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Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

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To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?

—Elon Musk, Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2021

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

—Steve Jobs

Prologue

Muse of Fire

As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.

When he was twelve, he was taken by bus to a wilderness survival camp, known as a veldskool. “It was a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” he recalls. The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged—to fight over them. “Bullying was considered a virtue,” his younger brother Kimbal says. The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff. Elon, who was small and emotionally awkward, got beaten up twice. He would end up losing ten pounds.

Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. “It was so insane, mind-blowing,” Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. “Don’t be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year,” they would say. “Don’t be the weak dumb fuck.”

The second time Elon went to veldskool, he was about to turn sixteen. He had gotten much bigger, bursting up to six feet with a bearlike frame, and had learned some judo. So veldskool wasn’t so bad. “I realized by then that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again. They might beat the shit out of me, but if I had punched them hard in the nose, they wouldn’t come after me again.”

South Africa in the 1980s was a violent place, with machine-gun attacks and knife killings common. Once, when Elon and Kimbal got off a train on their way to an anti-apartheid music concert, they had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain. For the rest of the evening, the blood on the soles of their sneakers made a sticky sound against the pavement.

The Musk family kept German Shepherd dogs that were trained to attack anyone running by the house. When he was six, Elon was racing down the driveway and his favorite dog attacked him, taking a massive bite out of his back. In the emergency room, when they were preparing to stitch him up, he resisted being treated until he was promised that the dog would not be punished. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Elon asked. They swore that they wouldn’t. In recounting the story, Musk pauses and stares vacantly for a very long time. “Then they damn well shot the dog dead.”

His most searing experiences came at school. For a long time, he was the

youngest and smallest student in his class. He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating. As a result, he was regularly picked on by bullies, who would come up and punch him in the face. “If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,” he says.

At assembly one morning, a student who was horsing around with a gang of friends bumped into him. Elon pushed him back. Words were exchanged. The boy and his friends hunted Elon down at recess and found him eating a sandwich. They came up from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down a set of concrete steps. “They sat on him and just kept beating the shit out of him and kicking him in the head,” says Kimbal, who had been sitting with him. “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.

But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon. After the school fight, Errol sided with the kid who pummeled Elon’s face. “The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.”

Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father, say his claim that Elon provoked the attack is unhinged and that the perpetrator ended up being sent to juvenile prison for it. They say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say. One minute he would be friendly, the next he would launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. “It was mental torture,” Elon says, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. “He sure knew how to make anything terrible.”

When I call Errol, he talks to me for almost three hours and then follows up regularly with calls and texts over the next two years. He is eager to describe and send me photos of the nice things he provided to his kids, at least during the periods when his engineering business was doing well. At one point he drove a

Rolls-Royce, built a wilderness lodge with his boys, and got raw emeralds from a mine owner in Zambia, until that business collapsed.

But he admits that he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness. “Their experiences with me would have made veldskool quite tame,” he says, adding that violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa. “Two held you down while another pummeled your face with a log and so on. New boys were forced to fight the school thug on their first day at a new school.” He proudly concedes that he exercised “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy” with his boys. Then he makes a point of adding, “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,” Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs, “and I suppose that may explain my particular malady.” In Elon Musk’s case, his father’s impact on his psyche would linger, despite many attempts to banish him, both physically and psychologically. Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as “demon mode.” Unlike his father, he would be caring with his kids, but in other ways, his behavior would hint at a danger that needed to be constantly battled: the specter that, as his mother put it, “he might become his father.” It’s one of the most resonant tropes in mythology. To what extent does the epic quest of the Star Wars hero require exorcising demons bequeathed by Darth Vader and wrestling with the dark side of the Force?

“With a childhood like his in South Africa, I think you have to shut yourself down emotionally in some ways,” says his first wife Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. “If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with.” This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment. “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers,” says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. “I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold became very high.”

During a particularly hellish period of his life in 2008, after the first three launches of his SpaceX rockets exploded and Tesla was about to go bankrupt, he would wake up thrashing and recount to Talulah Riley, who became his second wife, the horrendous things his father had once said. “I’d heard him use those phrases himself,” she says. “It had a profound effect on how he operates.” When he recalled these memories, he would zone out and seem to disappear behind his steel-colored eyes. “I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood,” Riley says. “But he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.”

Out of this cauldron, Musk developed an aura that made him seem, at times, like an alien, as if his Mars mission were an aspiration to return home and his desire to build humanoid robots were a quest for kinship. You’d not be totally shocked if he ripped off his shirt and you discovered that he had no navel and was not of this planet born. But his childhood also made him all too human, a tough yet vulnerable boy who decided to embark on epic quests.

He developed a fervor that cloaked his goofiness, and a goofiness that cloaked his fervor. Slightly uncomfortable in his own body, like a big man who was never an athlete, he would walk with the stride of a mission-driven bear and dance jigs that seemed taught by a robot. With the conviction of a prophet, he would speak about the need to nurture the flame of human consciousness, fathom the universe, and save our planet. At first I thought this was mainly role-playing, the team-boosting pep talks and podcast fantasies of a man-child who had read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy once too often. But the more I encountered it, the more I came to believe that his sense of mission was part of what drove him. While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.

His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly. “Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”

He became one of those people who feels most alive when a hurricane is coming. “I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk. He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama, both at work and in the romantic relationships he struggled and failed to maintain. He thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work. When he faced tortuous challenges, the strain would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit. But it also energized him. “He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.”

When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not summarily fired people. Then he paused and added, “But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.” And thus the question about Elon Musk: Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX making thirty-one successful rocket launches, Tesla selling close to a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on Earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode,” he told me, “which it has been in for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.”

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. That April, he snuck away to the Hawaiian house of his mentor Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, accompanied by the actress Natasha Bassett, an occasional girlfriend. He had been offered a board seat at Twitter, but over the weekend he concluded that wasn’t enough. It was in his nature to want total control. So he decided he would make a hostile bid to buy the company outright. Then he flew to Vancouver to meet Grimes. There he stayed up with her until 5 a.m. playing a new war-and-empire-building game, Elden Ring. Right after he finished, he pulled the trigger on his plan and went on Twitter. “I made an offer,” he announced.

Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place or felt threatened, it took him back to the horrors of being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

Cora and Walter Musk

Elon Musk’s attraction to risk was a family trait. In that regard, he took after his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions who was raised on a farm on the barren plains of central Canada. He studied chiropractic techniques in Iowa, then returned to his hometown near Moose Jaw, where he broke in horses and gave chiropractic adjustments in exchange for food and lodging.

He was eventually able to buy his own farm, but he lost it during the depression of the 1930s. For the next few years, he worked as a cowboy, rodeo performer, and construction hand. His one constant was a love for adventure. He married and divorced, traveled as a hobo on freight trains, and was a stowaway on an oceangoing ship.

The loss of his farm instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its first leader in Canada decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s national council.

He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy, which believed that government should be run by technocrats rather than politicians. It was temporarily outlawed in Canada because of its opposition to the country’s entry into World War II. Haldeman defied the ban by taking out a newspaper ad supporting the movement.

At one point he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, which is how he met Winnifred Fletcher, whose adventurous streak was equal to his. As a sixteen-year-old, she got a job at the Moose Jaw Times Herald, but she dreamed of being a dancer and actress. So she lit out by train to Chicago and then New York City. Upon her return, she opened a dance school in Moose Jaw, which is where Haldeman showed up for lessons. When he asked her to dinner, she replied, “I don’t date my clients.” So he quit the class and asked her out again. A few months later, he asked, “When will you marry me?” She responded, “Tomorrow.”

They had four children, including twin girls, Maye and Kaye, born in 1948. One day on a trip he spotted a For Sale sign on a single-engine Luscombe airplane sitting in a farmer’s field. He had no cash, but he convinced the farmer to take his car in exchange. It was rather impetuous, since Haldeman did not know how to fly. He hired someone to fly him home and teach him how to pilot

the plane.

The family came to be known as The Flying Haldemans, and he was described by a chiropractic trade journal as “perhaps the most remarkable figure in the history of flying chiropractors,” a rather narrow, albeit accurate, accolade. They bought a larger single-engine plane, a Bellanca, when Maye and Kaye were three months old, and the toddlers became known as “the flying twins.”

With his quirky conservative populist views, Haldeman came to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft. So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime. They took apart the Bellanca, crated it, and boarded a freighter for Cape Town. Haldeman decided he wanted to live inland, so they took off toward Johannesburg, where most of the white citizens spoke English rather than Afrikaans. But as they flew over nearby Pretoria, the lavender jacaranda flowers were in bloom, and Haldeman announced, “This is where we’ll stay.”

When Joshua and Winnifred were young, a charlatan named William Hunt, known (at least to himself) as “the Great Farini,” came to Moose Jaw and told tales of an ancient “lost city” he had seen when crossing the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. “This fabulist showed my grandfather pictures that were obviously fake, but he became a believer and decided it was his mission to rediscover it,” Musk says. Once in Africa, the Haldemans made a monthlong trek into the Kalahari every year to search for this legendary city. They hunted for their own food and slept with their guns so they could fend off lions.

The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously—carefully.” They embarked on long-distance flights to places such as Norway, tied for first place in the twelve-thousand-mile Cape Town–to-Algiers motor rally, and became the first to fly a single-engine plane from Africa to Australia. “They had to remove the back seats to put in gas tanks,” Maye later recalled.

Joshua Haldeman’s risk-taking eventually caught up with him. He was killed when a person he was teaching to fly hit a power line, causing the plane to flip and crash. His grandson Elon was three at the time. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” he says. “Risk energized him.”

Haldeman imprinted that spirit onto one of his twin girls, Elon’s mother, Maye. “I know that I can take a risk as long as I’m prepared,” she says. As a young student, she did well in science and math. She was also strikingly good-looking. Tall and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and sculpted chin, she began working at age fifteen as a model, doing department store runway shows on Saturday mornings.

Around that time, she met a boy in her neighborhood who was also strikingly

good-looking, albeit in a smooth and caddish way.

Errol Musk was an adventurer and wheeler-dealer, always on the lookout for the next opportunity. His mother, Cora, was from England, where she finished school at fourteen, worked at a factory making skins for fighter-bombers, then took a refugee ship to South Africa. There she met Walter Musk, a cryptographer and military intelligence officer who worked in Egypt on schemes to fool the Germans by deploying fake weapons and searchlights. After the war, he did little other than sit silently in an armchair, drink, and use his cryptology skills on crossword puzzles. So Cora left him, went back to England with their two sons, bought a Buick, and then returned to Pretoria. “She was the strongest person I ever met,” Errol says.

Errol earned a degree in engineering and worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories. On the side, he liked restoring old cars and planes. He also dabbled in politics, defeating an Afrikaner member of the pro-apartheid National Party to become one of the few English-speaking members of the Pretoria City Council. The Pretoria News for March 9, 1972, reported the election under the headline “Reaction against the Establishment.”

Like the Haldemans, he loved flying. He bought a twin-engine Cessna Golden Eagle, which he used to ferry television crews to a lodge he had built in the bush. On one trip in 1986, when he was looking to sell the plane, he landed at an airstrip in Zambia where a Panamanian-Italian entrepreneur offered to buy it. They agreed on a price, and instead of taking a payment in cash, Errol was given a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines that the entrepreneur owned in Zambia.

Zambia then had a postcolonial Black government, but there was no functioning bureaucracy, so the mine was not registered. “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you,” Errol says. He criticizes Maye’s family for being racist, which he insists he is not. “I don’t have anything against the Blacks, but they are just different from what I am,” he says in a rambling phone discourse.

Errol, who never had an ownership stake in the mine, expanded his trade by importing raw emeralds and having them cut in Johannesburg. “Many people came to me with stolen parcels,” he says. “On trips overseas I would sell emeralds to jewelers. It was a cloak-and-dagger thing, because none of it was legal.” After producing profits of roughly $210,000, his emerald business collapsed in the 1980s when the Russians created an artificial emerald in the lab. He lost all of his emerald earnings.

Errol Musk and Maye Haldeman began dating when they were young teenagers. From the start, their relationship was filled with drama. He repeatedly proposed to her, but she didn’t trust him. When she discovered he was cheating on her, she became so upset that she cried for a week and couldn’t eat. “Because of grief, I dropped ten pounds,” she recalls; it helped her win a local beauty contest. She got $150 in cash plus ten tickets to a bowling alley and became a finalist in the Miss South Africa contest.

When Maye graduated from college, she moved to Cape Town to give talks about nutrition. Errol came to visit, brought an engagement ring, and proposed. He promised he would change his ways and be faithful once they were married. Maye had just broken off a relationship with another unfaithful boyfriend, gained a lot of weight, and begun to fear that she would never get married, so she agreed.

The night of the wedding, Errol and Maye took an inexpensive flight to Europe for their honeymoon. In France, he bought copies of Playboy, which was banned in South Africa, and lay on the small hotel bed looking at them, much to Maye’s annoyance. Their fights turned bitter. When they got back to Pretoria, she thought of trying to get out of the marriage. But she soon became nauseated from morning sickness. She had become pregnant on the second night of their honeymoon, in the town of Nice. “It was clear that marrying him had been a mistake,” she recalls, “but now it was impossible to undo.”

2

Elon and Maye Musk

Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca

Elon ready for school

At 7:30 on the morning of June 28, 1971, Maye Musk gave birth to an eightpound, eight-ounce boy with a very large head.

At first she and Errol were going to name him Nice, after the town in France where he was conceived. History may have been different, or at least amused, if the boy had to go through life with the name Nice Musk. Instead, in the hope of making the Haldemans happy, Errol agreed that the boy would have names from that side of the family: Elon, after Maye’s grandfather J. Elon Haldeman, and Reeve, the maiden name of Maye’s maternal grandmother.

Errol liked the name Elon because it was biblical, and he later claimed that he had been prescient. As a child, he says, he heard about a science fiction book by the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun called Project Mars, which describes a colony on the planet run by an executive known as “the Elon.”

Elon cried a lot, ate a lot, and slept little. At one point Maye decided to just let him cry until he fell asleep, but she changed her mind after neighbors called the police. His moods switched rapidly; when he wasn’t crying, his mother says, he was really sweet.

Over the next two years, Maye had two more children, Kimbal and Tosca. She didn’t coddle them. They were allowed to roam freely. There was no nanny, just a housekeeper who paid little attention when Elon began experimenting with rockets and explosives. He says he’s surprised he made it through childhood with all of his fingers intact.

When he was three, his mother decided that because he was so intellectually curious he should be in nursery school. The principal tried to dissuade her, pointing out that being younger than anyone else in the class would present social challenges. They should wait another year. “I can’t do that,” Maye said. “He needs someone besides me to talk to. I really have this genius child.” She prevailed.

It was a mistake. Elon had no friends, and by the time he was in second grade he was tuning out. “The teacher would come up to me and yell at me, but I would not really see or hear her,” he says. His parents got called in to see the principal, who told them, “We have reason to believe that Elon is retarded.” He spent most of his time in a trance, not listening, one of his teachers explained. “He looks out of the window all the time, and when I tell him to pay attention he says, ‘The leaves are turning brown now.’ ” Errol replied that Elon was right, the leaves were turning brown.

The impasse was broken when his parents agreed that Elon’s hearing should

be tested, as if that might be the problem. “They decided it was an ear problem, so they took my adenoids out,” he says. That calmed down the school officials, but it did nothing to change his tendency to zone out and retreat into his own world when thinking. “Ever since I was a kid, if I start to think about something hard, then all of my sensory systems turn off,” he says. “I can’t see or hear or anything. I’m using my brain to compute, not for incoming information.” The other kids would jump up and down and wave their arms in his face to see if they could summon back his attention. But it didn’t work. “It’s best not to try to break through when he has that vacant stare,” his mother says.

Compounding his social problems was his unwillingness to suffer politely those he considered fools. He used the word “stupid” often. “Once he started going to school, he became so lonely and sad,” his mother says. “Kimbal and Tosca would make friends on the first day and bring them home, but Elon never brought friends home. He wanted to have friends, but he just didn’t know how.”

As a result, he was lonely, very lonely, and that pain remained seared into his soul. “When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone during a tumultuous period in his love life in 2017. “ ‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’ ”

One day when he was five, one of his cousins was having a birthday party, but Elon was punished for getting into a fight and told to stay home. He was a very determined kid, and he decided to walk on his own to his cousin’s house. The problem was that it was on the other side of Pretoria, a walk of almost two hours. Plus, he was too young to read the road signs. “I kind of knew what the route looked like because I had seen it from a car, and I was determined to get there, so I just started walking,” he says. He managed to arrive just as the party was ending. When his mother saw him coming down the road, she freaked out. Fearing he would be punished again, he climbed a maple tree and refused to come down. Kimbal remembers standing beneath the tree and staring at his older brother in awe. “He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening, and still is.”

When he was eight, he focused his determination on getting a motorcycle. Yes, at age eight. He would stand next to his father’s chair and make his case, over and over. When his father picked up a newspaper and ordered him to be quiet, Elon would continue to stand there. “It just was extraordinary to watch,” Kimbal says. “He would stand there silently, then resume his argument, then stand silent.” This happened every evening for weeks. His father finally caved and got Elon a blue-and-gold 50cc Yamaha.

Elon also had a tendency to be spacey and wander off on his own, oblivious to what others were doing. On a family trip to Liverpool to see some of their relatives when he was eight, his parents left him and his brother in a park to play

by themselves. It was not in his nature to stay put, so he started wandering the streets. “Some kid found me crying and took me to his mom, who gave me milk and biscuits and called the police,” he recalls. When he was reunited with his parents at the police station, he was unaware that anything was amiss.

“It was insane to leave me and my brother alone in a park at that age,” he says, “but my parents weren’t overprotective like parents are today.” Years later, I watched him at a solar roof construction site with his two-year-old boy, known as X. It was 10 p.m., and there were forklifts and other moving equipment lit by two spotlights that cast big shadows. Musk put X on the ground so the boy could explore on his own, which he did without fear. As he poked around amid the wires and cables, Musk glanced at him occasionally, but refrained from intervening. Finally, after X started to climb on a moving spotlight, Musk walked over and picked him up. X squirmed and squealed, unhappy about being restrained.

Musk would later talk about—even joke about—having Asperger’s, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a person’s social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. “He was never actually diagnosed as a kid,” his mother says, “but he says he has Asperger’s, and I’m sure he’s right.” The condition was exacerbated by his childhood traumas. Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened, his close friend Antonio Gracias says, the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses.

As a result, he was bad at picking up social cues. “I took people literally when they said something,” he says, “and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.” He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.

Like all psychological traits, Musk’s were complex and individualized. He could be very emotional, especially about his own children, and he felt acutely the anxiety that comes from being alone. But he didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy. Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.

Maye and Errol Musk were at an Oktoberfest celebration with three other couples, drinking beer and having fun, when a guy at another table whistled at Maye and called her sexy. Errol was furious, but not at the guy. The way Maye remembers it, he lunged and was about to hit her, and a friend had to restrain

him. She fled to her mother’s house. “Over time, he had gotten crazier,” Maye later said. “He would hit me when the kids were around. I remember that Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.”

Errol calls the accusations “absolute rubbish.” He claims he adored Maye, and over the years he tried to win her back. “I’ve never laid a hand on a woman in my life, and certainly none of my wives,” he says. “That’s one of women’s weapons is to cry that the man abused her, to cry and to lie. And a man’s weapons are to buy and to sign.”

On the morning after the Oktoberfest altercation, Errol came over to Maye’s mother’s house, apologized, and asked Maye to come back. “Don’t you dare touch her again,” Winnifred Haldeman said. “If you do, she’s coming to live with me.” Maye said that he never hit her after that, but his verbal abuse continued. He would tell her that she was “boring, stupid, and ugly.” The marriage never recovered. Errol later admitted it was his fault. “I had a very pretty wife, but there were always prettier, younger girls,” he said. “I really loved Maye, but I screwed up.” They divorced when Elon was eight.

Maye and the children moved to a house on the coast near Durban, about 380 miles south of the Pretoria-Johannesburg area, where she juggled jobs as a model and dietician. There was little money. She bought her kids secondhand books and uniforms. On some weekends and holidays the boys (but usually not Tosca) would take the train to see their father in Pretoria. “He would send them back without any clothes or bags, so I had to buy them new clothes every time,” she says. “He said that I would eventually return to him, because I would be so poverty-stricken and wouldn’t be able to feed them.”

Often she would have to travel on a modeling job or to give a nutrition lecture, leaving the kids at home. “I never felt guilty about working full-time, because I didn’t have a choice,” she says. “My children had to be responsible for themselves.” The freedom taught them to be self-reliant. When they faced a problem, she had a stock response: “You’ll figure it out.” As Kimbal recalls, “Mom wasn’t soft and cuddly, and she was always working, but that was a gift for us.”

Elon developed into a night person, staying up until dawn reading books. When he saw his mother’s light go on at 6 a.m., he would crawl into bed and fall asleep. That meant she had trouble getting him up in time for school, and on nights when she was away, he would sometimes not get to class until 10 a.m. After getting calls from the school, Errol launched a custody battle and had subpoenas issued for Elon’s teachers, Maye’s modeling agent, and their neighbors. Right before going to trial, Errol dropped the case. Every few years, he would initiate another court action and then drop it. When Tosca recounts these tales, she begins to cry. “I remember Mom just sitting there, sobbing on the

couch. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was to hold her.”

Maye and Errol were each drawn to dramatic intensity rather than domestic bliss, a trait they would pass on. After her divorce, Maye began dating another abusive man. The children hated him and would occasionally put tiny firecrackers in his cigarettes that would explode when he lit up. Soon after the man proposed marriage, he got another woman pregnant. “She had been a friend of mine,” Maye says. “We had modeled together.”

With broken tooth and scar

Elon pokes a tortoise and Errol watches

Kimbal and Elon with Peter and Russ Rive

The lodge in the Timbavati Game Reserve

At age ten, Musk made a fateful decision, one that he would later regret: he decided to move in with his father. He took the dangerous overnight train from Durban to Johannesburg on his own. When he spotted his father waiting for him at the station, he began “beaming with delight, like the sun,” Errol says. “Hi Dad, let’s get a hamburger!” he shouted. That night, he crawled into his father’s bed and slept there.

Why did he decide to move in with his father? Elon sighs and stays silent for almost a minute when I ask this. “My dad was lonely, so lonely, and I felt I should keep him company,” he finally says. “He used psychological wiles on me.” He also adored his grandmother, Errol’s mother Cora, known as Nana. She convinced him that it was unfair that his mother had all three children and his father had none.

In some ways, the move was not all that mysterious. Elon was ten, socially awkward, and had no friends. His mother was loving, but she was overworked, distracted, and vulnerable. His father, in contrast, was swaggering and manly, a big guy with large hands and a mesmerizing presence. His career had many ups and downs, but at that time he was feeling flush. He owned a gold-colored convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche and, more importantly, two sets of encyclopedias, lots of books, and a variety of engineering tools.

So Elon, still a small boy, chose to live with him. “It turned out to be a really bad idea,” he says. “I didn’t yet know how horrible he was.” Four years later, Kimbal followed. “I didn’t want to leave my brother alone with him,” Kimbal says. “My dad guilted my brother into going to live with him. And then he guilted me.”

“Why did he choose to go live with someone who inflicted pain?” Maye Musk asked forty years later. “Why didn’t he prefer a happy home?” Then she paused for a moment. “Maybe that’s just who he is.”

After the boys moved in, they helped Errol build a lodge that he could rent to tourists in the Timbavati Game Reserve, a pristine stretch of bush about three hundred miles east of Pretoria. During construction, they slept around a fire at night, with Browning rifles to protect them against lions. The bricks were made of river sand and the roof was grass. As an engineer, Errol liked studying the properties of various materials, and he made the floors out of mica because it was a good thermal insulator. Elephants in search of water often uprooted the pipes, and monkeys regularly broke into the pavilions and pooped, so there was a lot of

work for the boys to do.

Elon often accompanied visitors on hunts. Although he had only a .22 caliber rifle, it had a good scope and he became an expert shot. He even won a local skeet-shooting contest, though he was too young to accept the prize of a case of whiskey.

When Elon was nine, his father took him, Kimbal, and Tosca on a trip to America, where they drove from New York through the Midwest and then down to Florida. Elon became hooked on the coin-operated video games he found in the motel lobbies. “It was by far the most exciting thing,” he said. “We didn’t have that yet in South Africa.” Errol displayed his mix of flamboyance and frugality: he rented a Thunderbird but they stayed in budget inns. “When we got to Orlando, my father refused to take us to Disney World because it was too expensive,” Musk recalls. “I think we went to some water park instead.” As is often the case, Errol spins a different tale, insisting that they went both to Disney World, where Elon liked the haunted house ride, and to Six Flags over Georgia. “I told them over and over on the trip, ‘America is where you will come live someday.’ ”

Two years later, he took the three children to Hong Kong. “My father had some combination of legitimate business and hucksterism,” Musk recalls. “He left us in the hotel, which was pretty grungy, and just gave us fifty bucks or something, and we didn’t see him for two days.” They watched Samurai movies and cartoons on the hotel TV. Leaving Tosca behind, Elon and Kimbal wandered the streets, going into electronics stores where they could play video games for free. “Nowadays someone would call the child-protection service if someone did what our dad did,” Musk says, “but for us back then it was a wondrous experience.”

After Elon and Kimbal moved in with their father in suburban Pretoria, Maye moved to nearby Johannesburg so the family could be closer together. On Fridays, she would drive to Errol’s house to pick up the boys. They would then go see their grandmother, the indomitable Winnifred Haldeman, who cooked a chicken stew the kids hated so much that Maye would take them out for pizza afterward.

Elon and Kimbal usually spent the night at the house next door to their grandmother’s, where Maye’s sister Kaye Rive and her three boys lived. The five cousins—Elon and Kimbal Musk and Peter, Lyndon, and Russ Rive—became an adventurous and occasionally contentious bevy of bucks. Maye was more indulgent and less protective than her sister, so they would conspire with her

when plotting an adventure. “If we wanted to do something like go to a concert in Johannesburg, she would say to her sister, I’m going to go take them to church camp this evening,” says Kimbal. “Then she would drop us off and we would go do our mischief.”

Those trips could be dangerous. “I remember once when the train stopped, there was an immense fight, and we watched a guy get stabbed through the head,” says Peter Rive. “We were hiding inside the car, then the doors closed, and we were like moving on.” Sometimes a gang would board the train to hunt down rivals, rampaging through the cars shooting machine guns. Some of the concerts were anti-apartheid protests, such as one in 1985 in Johannesburg that drew 100,000 people. Often brawls would break out. “We didn’t try to hide from the violence, we became survivors of it,” says Kimbal. “It taught us to not be afraid but also to not do crazy things.”

Elon developed a reputation for being the most fearless. When the cousins went to a movie and people were making noise, he would be the one to go over and tell them to be quiet, even if they were much bigger. “It’s a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear,” Peter recalls. “That was definitely present even when he was a child.”

He was also the most competitive of the cousins. One time when they were riding their bicycles from Pretoria to Johannesburg, Elon was way out in front, pedaling fast. So the others pulled over and hitched a ride in a pickup truck. When Elon rejoined them, he was so angry that he started hitting them. It was a race, he said, and they had cheated.

Such fights were common. Often they would happen in public, the boys oblivious to their surroundings. One of the many that Elon and Kimbal had was at a country fair. “They were wrestling and punching each other in the dust,” Peter recalls. “People were freaking out, and I had to say to the crowd, ‘This is not a big deal. These guys are brothers.’ ” Although the fights were usually over small things, they could get vicious. “The way to win was to be the first person to punch or kick the other guy in the balls,” Kimbal says. “That would end the fight because you can’t continue if you get crunched in the balls.”

Musk was a good student, but not a superstar. When he was nine and ten, he got A’s in English and Math. “He is quick to grasp new mathematical concepts,” his teacher noted. But there was a constant refrain in the report card comments: “He works extremely slowly, either because he dreams or is doing what he should not.” “He seldom finishes anything. Next year he must concentrate on his work and not daydream during class.” “His compositions show a lively imagination,

but he doesn’t always finish in time.” His average grade before he got to high school was 83 out of 100.

After he was bullied and beaten in his public high school, his father moved him to a private academy, Pretoria Boys High School. Based on the English model, it featured strict rules, caning, compulsory chapel, and uniforms. There he got excellent grades in all but two subjects: Afrikaans (he got a 61 out of 100 his final year) and religious instruction (“not extending himself,” the teacher noted). “I wasn’t really going to put a lot of effort into things I thought were meaningless,” he says. “I would rather be reading or playing video games.” He got an A in the physics part of his senior certificate exams, but somewhat surprisingly, only a B in the math part.

In his spare time, he liked to make small rockets and experiment with different mixtures—such as swimming-pool chlorine and brake fluid—to see what would make the biggest bang. He also learned magic tricks and how to hypnotize people, once convincing Tosca that she was a dog and getting her to eat raw bacon.

As they would later do in America, the cousins pursued various entrepreneurial ideas. One Easter, they made chocolate eggs, wrapped them in foil, and sold them door-to-door. Kimbal came up with an ingenious scheme. Instead of selling them cheaper than the Easter eggs at the store, they made them more expensive. “Some people would balk at the price,” he says, “but we told them, ‘You’re actually supporting future capitalists.’ ”

Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch. When the family went to someone’s house, he would disappear into their host’s library. When they went into town, he would wander off and later be found at a bookstore, sitting on the floor, in his own world. He was also deeply into comics. The single-minded passion of the superheroes impressed him. “They’re always trying to save the world, with their underpants on the outside or these skin-tight iron suits, which is really pretty strange when you think about it,” he says. “But they are trying to save the world.”

Musk read both sets of his father’s encyclopedias and became, to his doting mother and sister, a “genius boy.” To other kids, however, he was an annoying nerd. “Look at the moon, it must be a million miles away,” a cousin once exclaimed. Replied Elon, “No, it’s like 239,000 miles, depending on the orbit.”

One book that he found in his father’s office described great inventions that would be made in the future. “I would come back from school and go to a side room in my father’s office and read it over and over,” he says. Among the ideas was a rocket propelled by an ion thruster, which would use particles rather than gas for thrust. Late one night at the control room of his rocket base in south

Texas, Musk described the book at length to me, including how an ion thruster would work in a vacuum. “That book is what first made me think about going to other planets,” he said.

Russ Rive, Elon, Kimbal, and Peter Rive

When Musk was young, his mother started taking him to Sunday school at the local Anglican Church, where she was a teacher. It did not go well. She would tell her class stories from the Bible, and he would question them. “What do you mean, the waters parted?” he asked. “That’s not possible.” When she told the story of Jesus feeding the crowd with loaves and fishes, he countered that things cannot materialize out of nothing. Having been baptized, he was expected to take communion, but he began questioning that as well. “I took the blood and body of Christ, which is weird when you’re a kid,” he says. “I said, ‘What the hell is this? Is this a weird metaphor for cannibalism?’ ” Maye decided to let Elon stay home and read on Sunday mornings.

His father, who was more God-fearing, told Elon that there were things that could not be known through our limited senses and minds. “There are no atheist pilots,” he would say, and Elon would add, “There are no atheists at exam time.” But Elon came to believe early on that science could explain things and so there was no need to conjure up a Creator or a deity that would intervene in our lives.

When he reached his teens, it began to gnaw at him that something was missing. Both the religious and the scientific explanations of existence, he says, did not address the really big questions, such as Where did the universe come from, and why does it exist? Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. “I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was,” he says. “And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.”

Like a good bookworm, he addressed these questions through reading. At first, he made the typical mistake of angsty adolescents and read existential philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer. This had the effect of turning confusion into despair. “I do not recommend reading Nietzsche as a teenager,” he says.

Fortunately, he was saved by science fiction, that wellspring of wisdom for game-playing kids with intellects on hyperdrive. He plowed through the entire sci-fi section in his school and local libraries, then pushed the librarians to order more.

One of his favorites was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a novel about a lunar penal colony. It is managed by a supercomputer, nicknamed Mike, that is able to acquire self-awareness and a sense of humor. The computer sacrifices its life during a rebellion at the penal colony. The book explores an issue that would become central to Musk’s life: Will artificial intelligence develop in ways that benefit and protect humanity, or will machines develop intentions

of their own and become a threat to humans?

That topic is central to what became another of his favorites, Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. The tales formulate laws of robotics that are designed to make sure robots do not get out of control. In the final scene of his 1985 novel Robots and Empire, Asimov expounds the most fundamental of these rules, dubbed the Zeroth Law: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” The heroes of Asimov’s Foundation series of books develop a plan to send settlers to distant regions of the galaxy to preserve human consciousness in the face of an impending dark age.

More than thirty years later, Musk unleashed a random tweet about how these ideas motivated his quest to make humans a space-faring species and to harness artificial intelligence to be at the service of humans: “Foundation Series & Zeroth Law are fundamental to creation of SpaceX.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide

The science fiction book that most influenced his wonder years was Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The jaunty and wry tale helped shape Musk’s philosophy and added a dollop of droll humor to his serious mien. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he says, “helped me out of my existential depression, and I soon realized it was amazingly funny in all sorts of subtle ways.”

The story involves a human named Arthur Dent who is rescued by a passing spaceship seconds before the Earth is destroyed by an alien civilization that is building a hyperspace highway. Along with his alien rescuer, Dent explores various nooks and crannies of the galaxy, which is run by a two-headed president who “had turned unfathomability into an art form.” The denizens of the galaxy are trying to figure out the “Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” They build a supercomputer that after seven million years spouts out the answer: 42. When that provokes a befuddled howl, the computer replies, “That quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.” That lesson stuck with Musk. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” he says.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide, combined with Musk’s later immersion into video and tabletop simulation games, led to a lifelong fascination with the tantalizing thought that we might merely be pawns in a simulation devised by some higher-order beings. As Douglas Adams writes, “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and

inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

Blastar

In the late 1970s, the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons became a popular obsession among the global tribe of geeks. Elon, Kimbal, and their Rive cousins immersed themselves in the game, which involves sitting around a table and, guided by character sheets and the roll of dice, embarking on fantasy adventures. One of the players serves as the Dungeon Master, refereeing the action.

Elon usually played the Dungeon Master and, surprisingly, did it with gentleness. “Even as a kid, Elon had a whole bunch of different demeanors and moods,” says his cousin Peter Rive. “As a Dungeon Master, he was incredibly patient, which is not, in my experience, always his default personality, if you know what I mean. It happens sometimes, and it’s so beautiful when it does.” Instead of pressuring his brother and cousins, he would turn very analytical to describe the options they had in each situation.

Together they entered a tournament in Johannesburg, at which they were the youngest players. The tournament’s Dungeon Master assigned their mission: you have to save this woman by figuring out who in the game is the bad guy and killing him. Elon looked at the Dungeon Master and said, “I think you’re the bad guy.” And so they killed him. Elon was right, and the game, which was supposed to last a few hours, was over. The organizers accused them of somehow cheating and at first tried to deny them the prize. But Musk prevailed. “These guys were idiots,” he says. “It was so obvious.”

Musk saw his first computer around the time he turned eleven. He was in a shopping mall in Johannesburg, and he stood there for minutes just staring at it. “I had read computer magazines,” he says, “but I had never actually seen a computer before.” As with the motorcycle, he hounded his father to get him one. Errol was bizarrely averse to computers, claiming they were good only for time-wasting games, not engineering. So Elon saved his money from odd jobs and bought a Commodore VIC-20, one of the earliest personal computers. It could play games such as Galaxian and Alpha Blaster, in which a player attempts to protect Earth from alien invaders.

The computer came with a course in how to program in BASIC that involved sixty hours of lessons. “I did it in three days, barely sleeping,” he remembers. A few months later, he tore out an ad for a conference on personal computers at a university and told his father he wanted to attend. Again, his father balked. It was an expensive seminar, about $400, and not meant for children. Elon replied that it was “essential” and just stood next to his father staring. Over the next few

days, Elon would pull the ad out of his pocket and renew his demand. Finally his father was able to talk the university into giving a discounted price for Elon to stand in the back. When Errol came to pick him up at the end, he found Elon engaging with three of the professors. “This boy must get a new computer,” one of them declared.

After he aced a programming skills test at his school, he got an IBM PC/XT and taught himself to program using Pascal and Turbo C++. At age thirteen, he was able to create a video game, which he named Blastar, using 123 lines of BASIC and some simple assembly language to get the graphics to work. He submitted it to PC and Office Technology magazine, and it appeared in the December 1984 issue with a short introduction explaining, “In this game, you have to destroy an alien space freighter, which is carrying deadly Hydrogen Bombs and Status Beam Machines.” Although it’s unclear what a Status Beam Machine is, the concept sounds cool. The magazine paid him $500, and he proceeded to sell it two other games, one like Donkey Kong and the other simulating roulette and blackjack.

Thus began a lifelong addiction to video games. “If you’re playing with Elon, you play pretty much nonstop until finally you have to eat,” Peter Rive says. On one trip to Durban, Elon figured out how to hack the games in a mall. He was able to hotwire the system so that they could play for hours without using any coins.

He then came up with a grander idea: the cousins could create a video-game arcade of their own. “We knew exactly which games were the most popular, so it seemed like a sure thing,” Elon says. He figured out how the cash flow could finance the machines. But when the boys tried to get the city permits, they were told they needed someone over eighteen to sign the application. Kimbal, who had filled out the thirty pages of forms, decided that they couldn’t ask Errol. “He was just too hard of a human,” Kimbal says. “So we went to Russ and Pete’s dad, and he flipped out. That basically shut the whole thing down.”

Escape Velocity Leaving South Africa, 1989

At age seventeen, after seven years of living with his father, Elon realized that he would have to escape. Life with him had become increasingly unnerving.

There were times when Errol would be jovial and fun, but occasionally he would become dark, verbally abusive, and possessed by fantasies and conspiracies. “His mood could change on a dime,” Tosca says. “Everything could be super, then within a second he would be vicious and spewing abuse.” It was almost as if he had a split personality. “One minute he would be super friendly,” Kimbal says, “and the next he would be screaming at you, lecturing you for hours—literally two or three hours while he forced you to just stand there— calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.”

Elon’s cousins became reluctant to visit. “You never knew what you were in for,” Peter Rive says. “Sometimes Errol would be like, ‘I just got us some new motorbikes so let’s jump on them.’ At other times he would be angry and threatening and, oh fuck, make you clean the toilets with a toothbrush.” When Peter tells me this, he pauses for a moment and then, a bit hesitantly, notes that Elon sometimes has similar mood swings. “When Elon’s in a good mood, it’s like the coolest, funnest thing in the world. And when he’s in a bad mood, he goes really dark, and you’re just walking on eggshells.”

One day Peter came over to the house and found Errol sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel. He was trying to see whether microwaves could affect it. He would spin the wheel, mark down the result, then spin it and put it in a microwave oven and record the result. “It was nuts,” Peter says. Errol had become convinced that he could find a system for beating the game. He dragged Elon to the Pretoria casino many times, dressing him up so that he looked older than sixteen, and had him write down the numbers while Errol used a calculator hidden under a betting card.

Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.”

I’m not quite sure what all that means. Neither is Elon: “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” Errol can be very forceful and occasionally convincing. “He changes reality around him,” Kimbal says. “He will literally make up things, but he actually believes his own false reality.”

Sometimes Errol would make sweeping assertions to his kids that were unconnected to facts, such as insisting that in the United States the president is considered divine and cannot be criticized. At other times he would weave fanciful tales that cast himself as either the hero or the victim. All would be asserted with such conviction that Elon and Kimbal would find themselves questioning their own view of reality. “Can you imagine growing up like that?” Kimbal asks. “It was mental torture, and it infects you. You end up asking, ‘What is reality?’ ”

I found myself getting caught up in Errol’s tangled web. In a series of calls and emails over the course of two years, he gave me varying accounts of his relationship with, and his feelings for, his kids, Maye, and his stepdaughter, with whom he would have two children (more on that later). “Elon and Kimbal have developed their own narrative about what I was like, and it doesn’t accord with the facts,” he claims. Their tales about him being psychologically abusive, he insists, are told to please their mother. But when I press him, he tells me to go with their version. “I don’t care if they choose a different narrative, as long as they are happy. I have no desire for it to be my word versus theirs. Let them have the floor.”

When talking about his father, Elon will sometimes let loose a laugh, a somewhat harsh and bitter one. It’s similar to the laugh that his father has. Some of the words Elon uses, the way he stares, his sudden transitions from light to dark to light, remind his family members of the Errol simmering inside of him. “I would see shades of these horrible stories Elon told me surface in his own behavior,” says Justine, Elon’s first wife. “It made me realize how difficult it is not to be shaped by what we grew up with, even when that’s not what we want.” Every now and then, she dared to say something like “You’re turning into your father.” She explains, “It was our code phrase to warn him that he was going into the realm of darkness.”

But Justine says that Elon, who was always emotionally invested in their children, is different from his father in a fundamental way: “With Errol, there was a sense that really bad things could happen around him. Whereas if the zombie apocalypse happened, you’d want to be on Elon’s team, because he would figure out a way to get those zombies in line. He can be very harsh, but at the end of the day, you can trust him to find a way to prevail.”

In order for that to happen, he had to move on. It was time to leave South Africa.

Musk began pushing both his mother and father, trying to convince them to move to the United States and take him and his siblings. Neither was interested. “So then I was like, ‘Well, I’m just going to go by myself,’ ” he says.

He first tried to get U.S. citizenship on the grounds that his mother’s father had been born in Minnesota, but that failed because his mother had been born in Canada and had never claimed U.S. citizenship. So he concluded that getting to Canada might be an easier first step. He went to the Canadian consulate on his own, got application forms for a passport, and filled them out not only for himself but for his mother, brother, and sister (but not father). The approvals came through in late May 1989.

“I would have left the next morning, but airline tickets were cheaper back then if you bought them fourteen days in advance,” he says, “so I had to wait those two weeks.” On June 11, 1989, about two weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, he had dinner at Pretoria’s finest restaurant, Cynthia’s, with his father and siblings, who then drove him to the Johannesburg airport.

“You’ll be back in a few months,” Elon says his father told him contemptuously. “You’ll never be successful.”

As usual, Errol has his own version of the story, in which he was the action hero. According to him, Elon became seriously depressed during his senior year of high school. His despair reached a head on Republic Day, May 31, 1989. His family was preparing to watch the parade, but Elon refused to get out of bed. His father leaned against the big desk in Elon’s room, with its well-used computer, and asked, “Do you want to go and study in America?” Elon perked up. “Yes,” he answered. Errol claims, “It was my idea. Up until then, he had never said that he wanted to go to America. So I said, ‘Well, tomorrow you should go and see the American cultural attaché,’ who was a friend of mine from Rotary.”

His father’s account, Elon says, was just another of his elaborate fantasies casting him as the hero. In this case, it was provably false. By Republic Day 1989, Elon had already gotten a Canadian passport and purchased his airline ticket.

A myth has grown that Musk, because his father was on-and-off successful, arrived in North America in 1989 with a lot of money, perhaps pockets filled with emeralds. Errol at times encouraged that perception. But in fact, what Errol got from the Zambian emerald mine had become worthless years earlier. When Elon left South Africa, his father gave him $2,000 in traveler’s checks and his mother provided him with another $2,000 by cashing out a stock account she had opened with the money she won in a beauty contest as a teenager. Otherwise, what he mainly had with him when he arrived in Montreal was a list of his mother’s relatives he had never met.

He planned to call his mother’s uncle, but discovered that he had left Montreal. So he went to a youth hostel, where he shared a room with five other people. “I was used to South Africa, where people will just rob and kill you,” he says. “So I slept on my backpack until I realized that not everyone was a murderer.” He wandered the town marveling that people did not have bars on their windows.

After a week, he bought a $100 Greyhound Discovery Pass that allowed him to travel by bus anywhere in Canada for six months. He had a second cousin his age, Mark Teulon, who lived on a farm in Saskatchewan province not far from Moose Jaw, where his grandparents had lived, so he headed there. It was more than 1,700 miles from Montreal.

The bus, which stopped at every hamlet, took days to wander across Canada. At one stop, he got off to find lunch and, just as the bus was leaving, ran to jump back on. Unfortunately, the driver had taken off his suitcase with his traveler’s checks and clothes. All he had now was the knapsack of books he carried everywhere. The difficulty of getting traveler’s checks replaced (it took weeks) was an early taste of how the financial payments system needed disruption.

When he got to the town near his cousin’s farm, he used some of the change he had in his pocket to call. “Hey, it’s Elon, your cousin from South Africa,” he said. “I’m at the bus station.” The cousin showed up with his father, took him to a Sizzler steak house, and invited him to stay at their wheat farm, where he was put to work cleaning grain bins and helping to raise a barn. There he celebrated his eighteenth birthday with a cake they baked with “Happy Birthday Elon” written in chocolate icing.

After six weeks, he got back on the bus and headed for Vancouver, another thousand miles away, to stay with his mother’s half-brother. When he went to an employment office, he saw that most jobs paid $5 an hour. But there was one that paid $18 an hour, cleaning out the boilers in the lumber mill. This involved

donning a hazmat suit and shimmying through a small tunnel that led to the chamber where the wood pulp was being boiled while shoveling out the lime that had caked on the walls. “If the person at the end of the tunnel didn’t remove the goo fast enough, you would be trapped while sweating your guts out,” he recalls. “It was like a Dickensian steampunk nightmare filled with dark pipes and the sound of jackhammers.”

While Elon was in Vancouver, Maye Musk flew from South Africa, having decided that she wanted to move as well. She sent back scouting reports to Tosca. Vancouver was too cold and rainy, she wrote. Montreal was exciting, but people there spoke French. Toronto, she concluded, was where they should go. Tosca promptly sold their house and furniture in South Africa, then she joined their mother in Toronto, where Elon also moved. Kimbal stayed behind in Pretoria to finish his last year in high school.

At first they all lived in a one-bedroom apartment, with Tosca and her mother sharing a bed while Elon slept on the couch. There was little money. Maye remembers crying when she spilled some milk because she didn’t have enough to buy any more.

Tosca got a job at a hamburger joint, Elon as an intern in Microsoft’s Toronto office, and Maye at the university, a modeling agency, and as a diet consultant. “I worked every day and also four nights a week,” she says. “I took off one afternoon, Sunday, to do the laundry and get groceries. I didn’t even know what my kids were doing, because I was hardly at home.”

After a few months, they were making enough money to afford a rent-controlled three-bedroom apartment. It had felt wallpaper, which Maye insisted that Elon rip down, and a horrid carpet. They were going to buy a $200 replacement carpet, but Tosca insisted on a thicker one for $300 because Kimbal and their cousin Peter were coming over to join them and would sleep on the floor. Their second big purchase was a computer for Elon.

He had no friends or social life in Toronto, and he spent most of his time reading or working on the computer. Tosca, on the contrary, was a saucy teenager, eager to go out. “I’m coming with you,” Elon would declare, not wanting to be lonely. “No you’re not,” she would reply. But when he insisted, she ordered, “You have to stay ten feet away from me at all times.” He did. He would walk behind her and her friends, carrying a book to read whenever they went into a club or party.

Dancing with Kimbal in Toronto

With Navaid Farooq at Queen’s and with his new suit

Musk’s college-admissions test scores were not especially notable. On his second round of the SAT tests, he got a 670 out of 800 on his verbal exam and a 730 on math. He narrowed his choices to two universities that were an easy drive from Toronto: Waterloo and Queen’s. “Waterloo was definitely better for engineering, but it didn’t seem great from a social standpoint,” he says. “There were few girls there.” He felt he knew computer science and engineering as well as any of the professors at both places, but he desperately desired a social life. “I didn’t want to spend my undergraduate time with a bunch of dudes.” So in the fall of 1990 he enrolled at Queen’s.

He was placed on the “international floor” of one of the dorms, where, on the first day, he met a student named Navaid Farooq, who became his first real and lasting friend outside of his family. Farooq’s father was Pakistani and his mother Canadian, and he was raised in Nigeria and Switzerland, where his parents worked for United Nations organizations. Like Elon, he had made no close friends in high school. At Queen’s, he and Musk quickly bonded over their interests in computer and board games, obscure history, and science fiction. “For me and Elon,” Farooq says, “it was probably the first place we were socially accepted and could be ourselves.”

During his first year, Musk got A’s in Business, Economics, Calculus, and Computer Programming, but he got B’s in Accounting, Spanish, and Industrial Relations. The following year, he took another course in Industrial Relations, which studies the dealings between workers and management. Again, he got a B. He later told the Queen’s alumni magazine that the most important thing he learned during his two years there was “how to work collaboratively with smart people and make use of the Socratic method to achieve commonality of purpose,” a skill, like those of industrial relations, that future colleagues would notice had been only partly honed.

He was more interested in late-night philosophy discussions about the meaning of life. “I was really hungry for that,” he says, “because until then I had no friends I could talk to about these things.” But most of all, he became immersed, with Farooq at his side, in the world of board and computer games.

“What you’re doing is not rational,” Musk explained in his flat monotone. “You’re actually hurting yourself.” He and Farooq were playing the strategy board game Diplomacy with friends in their dorm, and one of the players was

allying himself with another against Musk. “If you do this, I will turn your allies against you and inflict pain on you.” Musk tended to win, Farooq says, by being convincing in his negotiations and threats.

Musk had enjoyed all types of video games as a teenager in South Africa, including first-person shooters and adventure quests, but at college he became more focused on the genre known as strategy games, ones that involve two or more players competing to build an empire using high-level strategy, resource management, supply-chain logistics, and tactical thinking.

Strategy games—those played on a board and then those for computers— would become central to Musk’s life. From The Ancient Art of War, which he played as a teen in South Africa, to his addiction to The Battle of Polytopia three decades later, he relished the complex planning and competitive management of resources that are required to prevail. Immersing himself in these games for hours became the way he relaxed, escaped stress, and honed his tactical skills and strategic thinking for business.

While he was at Queen’s, the first great computer-based strategy game was released: Civilization. In it, players compete to build a society from prehistory to the present by choosing what technologies to develop and production facilities to build. Musk moved his desk so that he could sit on his bed and Farooq on a chair to face off and play the game. “We completely entered a zone for hours until we were exhausted,” Farooq says. They moved on to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, where a key part of the strategy is to develop a sustainable supply of resources, such as metals from mines. After hours of playing, they would take a break for a meal, and Elon would describe the moment in the game when he knew he was going to win. “I am wired for war,” he told Farooq.

One class at Queen’s used a strategy game in which teams competed in a simulation of growing a business. The players could decide the prices of their products, the amount spent on advertising, what profits to plow back into research, and other variables. Musk figured out how to reverse-engineer the logic that controlled the simulation, so he was able to win every time.

When Kimbal moved to Canada and joined Elon as a student at Queen’s, the brothers developed a routine. They would read the newspaper and pick out the person they found most interesting. Elon was not one of those eager-beaver types who liked to attract and charm mentors, so the more gregarious Kimbal took the lead in cold-calling the person. “If we were able to get through on the phone, they usually would have lunch with us,” he says.

One they picked was Peter Nicholson, the executive in charge of strategic

planning at Scotiabank. Nicholson was an engineer with a master’s degree in physics and a PhD in math. When Kimbal got through to him, he agreed to have lunch with the boys. Their mother took them shopping at Eaton’s department store, where the purchase of a $99 suit got you a free shirt and tie. At lunch they discussed philosophy and physics and the nature of the universe. Nicholson offered them summer jobs, inviting Elon to work directly with him on his three-person strategic planning team.

Nicholson, then forty-nine, and Elon had fun together solving math puzzles and weird equations. “I was interested in the philosophical side of physics and how it related to reality,” Nicholson says. “I didn’t have a lot of other people to talk to about these things.” They also discussed what had become Musk’s passion: space travel.

When Elon went with Nicholson’s daughter, Christie, to a party one evening, his first question was “Do you ever think about electric cars?” As he later admitted, it was not the world’s best come-on line.

One topic Musk researched for Nicholson was Latin American debt. Banks had made billions in loans to countries such as Brazil and Mexico that could not be repaid, and in 1989 the U.S. Treasury secretary, Nicholas Brady, packaged these debt obligations into tradable securities known as “Brady Bonds.” Because these bonds were backed by the U.S. government, Musk believed that they would always be worth 50 cents on the dollar. However, some were selling as low as 20 cents.

Musk figured that Scotiabank could make billions by buying the bonds at that cheap price, and he called the Goldman Sachs trading desk in New York to make sure they were available. “Yeah, how much you want?” the gruff trader on the phone responded. “Would it be possible to get five million?” Musk asked, putting on a deep and serious voice. When the trader said that would be no problem, Musk quickly hung up. “I was like, ‘Jackpot, no-lose proposition here,’ ” he says. “I ran to tell Peter about it and thought they would give me some money to do it.” But the bank rejected the idea. The CEO said it already held too much Latin American debt. “Wow, this is just insane,” Musk said to himself. “Is this how banks think?”

Nicholson says that Scotiabank was navigating the Latin American debt situation using its own methods, which worked better. “He came away with an impression that the bank was a lot dumber than in fact it was,” Nicholson says. “But that was a good thing, because it gave him a healthy disrespect for the financial industry and the audacity to eventually start what became PayPal.”

Musk also drew another lesson from his time at Scotiabank: he did not like,

nor was he good at, working for other people. It was not in his nature to be deferential or to assume that others might know more than he did.

Musk got bored at Queen’s. It was beautiful, but not academically challenging. So when one of his classmates transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, he decided to see if he could do so as well.

Money was a problem. His father was providing no support, and his mother was juggling three jobs to make ends meet. But Penn offered him a $14,000 scholarship plus a student loan package, so in 1992 he transferred there for his junior year.

He decided to major in physics because, like his father, he was drawn to engineering. The essence of being an engineer, he felt, was to address any problem by drilling down to the most fundamental tenets of physics. He also decided to pursue a joint degree in business. “I was concerned that if I didn’t study business, I would be forced to work for someone who did,” he says. “My goal was to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and never have to work for a boss with a business degree.”

Even though he was neither political nor gregarious, he ran for student assembly. One of his campaign pledges poked fun at those who sought student office in order to polish their résumés. The final promise of his campaign platform was “If this position ever appears on my résumé, to stand on [my] head and eat 50 copies of the offending document in a public place.” Fortunately, he lost, which saved him from falling in with the student-government types, a world for which he was temperamentally unsuited. Instead, he fit comfortably into a crowd of geeks who liked making clever jokes involving scientific forces, playing Dungeons & Dragons, binging on video games, and writing computer code.

His closest friend in this crowd was Robin Ren, who had won a Physics Olympiad in his native China before coming to Penn. “He was the only person better than me at physics,” Musk says. They became partners in the physics lab, where they studied how the properties of various materials change at extreme temperatures. At the end of one set of experiments, Musk took erasers from the ends of pencils, dropped them into a jar of super-cold liquid, then smashed them on the floor. He developed an interest in knowing, and being able to visualize, the properties of materials and alloys at different temperatures.

Ren recalls that Musk focused on the three areas that would shape his career. Whether he was calibrating the force of gravity or analyzing the properties of materials, he would discuss with Ren how the laws of physics applied to building rockets. “He kept talking about making a rocket that could go to Mars,” Ren recalls. “Of course, I didn’t pay much attention, because I thought he was fantasizing.”

Musk also focused on electric cars. He and Ren would grab lunch from one of the food trucks and sit on the campus lawn, where Musk would read academic papers on batteries. California had just passed a requirement mandating that 10 percent of vehicles by 2003 had to be electric. “I want to go make that happen,” Musk said.

Musk also became convinced that solar power, which in 1994 was just taking off, was the best path toward sustainable energy. His senior paper was titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He was motivated not just by the dangers of climate change but also by the fact that fossil fuel reserves would start to dwindle. “Society will soon have no option but to focus on renewable power sources,” he wrote. His final page showed a “power station of the future,” involving a satellite with mirrors that would concentrate sunlight onto solar panels and send the resulting electricity back to Earth via a microwave beam. The professor gave him a grade of 98, saying it was a “very interesting and well written paper, except the last figure that comes out of the blue.”

Throughout his life, Musk had three ways of escaping the emotional drama that he tended to generate. The first was the one that he shared with Navaid Farooq at Queen’s: an ability to zone out on empire-building strategy games, such as Civilization and Polytopia. Robin Ren reflected another facet of Musk: the encyclopedia reader who liked to immerse himself in, as The Hitchhiker’s Guide put it, “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

At Penn, he developed a third mode of relaxation—a taste for partying—that drew him out of the lonely shell that had surrounded him as a kid. His partner and enabler was a fun-loving social animal named Adeo Ressi. A tall guy with a big head, laugh, and personality, Ressi was an Italian American from Manhattan who loved nightclubs. An offbeat character, he started an environmental newspaper called Green Times and attempted to create his own major called “Revolution” with copies of the newspaper as his senior thesis.

Like Musk, Ressi was a transfer student, so they were put in the freshman dorm, where there were rules against parties and visitors after 10 p.m. Neither of them liked following rules, so they rented a house in a sketchy part of West Philadelphia.

Ressi came up with a scheme to throw big monthly parties. They covered the windows and decorated the house with black lights and phosphorescent posters. At one point Musk discovered that his desk had been painted in lacquered glow-in-the-dark colors and nailed to the wall by Ressi, who called it an art installation. Musk took it down and declared that, no, it was a desk. At a junkyard they found

a metal sculpture of a horse’s head and put a red light inside, so beams darted out of its eyes. There was a band on one floor, a DJ on another, tables with beer and Jell-O shots, and someone at the door to collect the $5 entrance fee. On some nights they would draw five hundred people, which would easily pay the rent for a month.

When Maye visited, she was appalled. “I filled eight garbage bags and swept the place, and I thought they would be grateful,” she says. “But they didn’t even notice.” At their party that night, they stationed her in Elon’s bedroom near the front door to check coats and guard the money. She kept a pair of scissors in her hand, which she thought she could use on anyone who tried to steal the cash box, and she moved Elon’s mattress next to one of the exterior walls. “The house was shaking and bouncing so much from the music that I thought a ceiling might collapse, so I figured if I was at the edge I’d be safer.”

Although Elon loved the vibe of the parties, he never got fully immersed in them. “I was stone cold sober at the time,” he says. “Adeo would get wasted. I’d be banging on his door and say, like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to come up and manage the party.’ I ended up being the one who had to keep an eye on things.”

Ressi later marveled that Musk usually seemed a bit detached. “He enjoyed being around a party but not fully in it. The only thing he binged on was video games.” Despite all of their partying, he understood that Musk was fundamentally alienated and withdrawn, like an observer from a different planet trying to learn the motions of sociability. “I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier,” he says.

Go West

Silicon Valley, 1994–1995

July 1994

At Ivy League schools in the 1990s, ambitious students were tugged either east toward the gilded realms of Wall Street banking or west toward the tech utopianism and entrepreneurial zeal of Silicon Valley. At Penn, Musk received some internship offers from Wall Street, all lucrative, but finance did not interest him. He felt that bankers and lawyers did not contribute much to society. Besides, he disliked the students he met in business classes. Instead, he was drawn to Silicon Valley. It was the decade of rational exuberance, when one could just slap a .com onto any fantasy and wait for the thunder of Porsches to descend from Sand Hill Road with venture capitalists waving checks.

He got his opportunity in the summer of 1994, between his junior and senior years at Penn, when he scored two internships that allowed him to indulge his passions for electric vehicles, space, and video games.

By day he worked at Pinnacle Research Institute, a twenty-person group that had modest Defense Department contracts to study a “supercapacitor” developed by its founder. A capacitor is a device that can briefly hold an electric charge and discharge it quickly, and Pinnacle thought that it could make one that was powerful enough to provide energy for electric cars and space-based weapons. In a paper he wrote at the end of the summer, Musk declared, “It is important to note that the Ultracapacitor is not simply an incremental improvement, but a radically new technology.”

In the evening he worked at a small Palo Alto company called Rocket Science, which made video games. When he showed up at their building one night and asked for a summer job, they gave him a problem they hadn’t been able to solve: how to coax a computer to multitask by reading graphics that were stored on a CD-ROM while simultaneously moving an avatar on the screen. He went on internet message boards to ask other hackers how to bypass the BIOS and joystick reader using DOS. “None of the senior engineers had been able to solve this problem, and I solved it in two weeks,” he says.

They were impressed and wanted him to work full-time, but he needed to graduate in order to get a U.S. work visa. In addition, he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. “I wanted to have more impact,” he says.

One unfortunate trend in the 1980s was that cars and computers became tightly

sealed appliances. It was possible to open up and fiddle with the innards of the Apple II that Steve Wozniak designed in the late 1970s, but you couldn’t do that with the Macintosh, which Steve Jobs in 1984 made almost impossible to open. Similarly, kids in the 1970s and earlier grew up rummaging under the hoods of cars, tinkering with the carburetors, changing spark plugs, and souping up the engines. They had a fingertip-feel for valves and Valvoline. This hands-on imperative and Heathkit mindset even applied to radios and television sets; if you wanted, you could change the tubes and later the transistors and have a feel for how a circuit board worked.

This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. They never knew the sweet smell of a soldering iron, but they could code in ways that made circuits sing. Musk was different. He liked hardware as well as software. He could code, but he also had a feel for physical components, such as battery cells and capacitors, valves and combustion chambers, fuel pumps and fan belts.

In particular, Musk loved fiddling with cars. At the time, he owned a twentyyear-old BMW 300i, and he spent Saturdays rummaging around junkyards in Philadelphia to score the parts he needed to soup it up. It had a four-speed transmission, but he decided to upgrade it when BMW started making a five-speed. Borrowing the lift at a local repair shop, he was able, with a couple of shims and a little bit of grinding, to jam a five-speed transmission into what had been a four-speed car. “It was really able to haul ass,” he recalls.

He and Kimbal drove the car from Palo Alto back to Philadelphia at the end of the summer of internships in 1994. “We both were, like, university sucks, there’s no hurry to get back,” Kimbal recalls, “so we did a three-week road trip.” The car broke down repeatedly. On one occasion, they were able to get it to a dealership in Colorado Springs, but after the repairs it failed again. So they pushed it to a truck stop where Elon successfully reworked everything the professional mechanic had done.

Musk also took the BMW on a trip with his college girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Gwynne. Over Christmas break in 1994, they drove from Philadelphia to Queen’s University, where Kimbal was still studying, and then to Toronto to see his mother. There he gave Jennifer a small gold necklace with a smooth green emerald. “His mom had a number of these necklaces in a case in her bedroom, and Elon told me they were from his father’s emerald mine in South Africa—he pulled one from the case,” Jennifer noted twenty-five years later, when she auctioned it online. In fact, the long-bankrupt mine had not been in South Africa and was not owned by his father, but at the time Musk didn’t mind giving that impression.

When he graduated in the spring of 1995, Musk decided to take another

cross-country trip to Silicon Valley. He brought along Robin Ren, after teaching him how to drive a stick shift. They stopped at the just-opened Denver airport because Musk wanted to see the baggage-handling system. “He was fascinated by how they designed the robotic machines to handle the luggage without human intervention,” Ren says. But the system was a mess. Musk took away a lesson he would have to relearn when he built highly robotic Tesla factories. “It was overautomated, and they underestimated the complexity of what they were building,” he says.

Musk planned to enroll at Stanford at the end of the summer to study material science as a graduate student. Still fascinated by capacitors, he wanted to research how they might power electric cars. “The idea was to leverage advanced chipmaking equipment to make a solid state ultracapacitor with enough energy density to give a car long range,” he says. But as he got closer to enrolling, he began to worry. “I figured I could spend several years at Stanford, get a PhD, and my conclusion on capacitors would be that they aren’t feasible,” he says. “Most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually move the needle is almost none.”

He had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.” In the summer of 1995, it became clear to him that the first of these, the internet, was not going to wait for him to finish graduate school. The web had just been opened up for commercial use, and that August the browser startup Netscape went public, soaring within a day to a market value of $2.9 billion.

Musk had come up with an idea for an internet company during his final year at Penn, when an executive from NYNEX came to speak about the phone company’s plans to launch an online version of the Yellow Pages. Dubbed “Big Yellow,” it would have interactive features so that users could tailor the information to their personal needs, the executive said. Musk thought (correctly, as it turned out) that NYNEX had no clue how to make it truly interactive. “Why don’t we do it ourselves?” he suggested to Kimbal, and he began writing code that could combine business listings with map data. They dubbed it the Virtual City Navigator.

Just before the enrollment deadline for Stanford, Musk went to Toronto to get advice from Peter Nicholson of Scotiabank. Should he pursue the idea for the Virtual City Navigator, or should he start the PhD program? Nicholson, who had a PhD from Stanford, did not equivocate. “The internet revolution only comes once in a lifetime, so strike while the iron is hot,” he told Musk as they walked along the shore of Lake Ontario. “You will have lots of time to go to

graduate school later if you’re still interested.” When Musk got back to Palo Alto, he told Ren he had made up his mind. “I need to put everything else on hold,” he said. “I need to catch the internet wave.”

He actually hedged his bets. He officially enrolled at Stanford and then immediately requested a deferral. “I’ve written some software with the first internet maps and Yellow Pages directory,” he told Bill Nix, the material science professor. “I will probably fail, and if so I would like to come back.” Nix said it would not be a problem for Musk to defer his studies, but he predicted that he would never come back.

May 1995

Celebrating the sale of Zip2 with Maye and Kimbal; taking delivery of the McLaren with Justine

Some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations. The idea that Elon and Kimbal had in early 1995, just as the web was starting to grow exponentially, was simple: put a searchable directory of businesses online and combine it with map software that would give users directions to them. Not everyone saw the potential. When Kimbal had a meeting at the Toronto Star, which published the Yellow Pages in that city, the president picked up a thick edition of the directory and threw it at him. “Do you honestly think you’re ever going to replace this?” he asked.

The brothers rented a tiny office in Palo Alto that had room for two desks and futons. For the first six months, they slept in the office and showered at the YMCA. Kimbal, who would later become a chef and restaurateur, got an electric coil and cooked meals occasionally. But mainly they ate at Jack in the Box, because it was cheap, open twenty-four hours, and just a block away. “I can still tell you every single menu item,” Kimbal says. “It’s just seared into my brain.” Elon became a fan of the teriyaki bowl.

After a few months, they rented an unfurnished apartment that stayed that way. “All it had was two mattresses and lots of Cocoa Puffs boxes,” says Tosca. Even after they moved in, Elon spent many nights in the office, crashing under his desk when he was exhausted from coding. “He had no pillow, he had no sleeping bag. I don’t know how he did it,” says Jim Ambras, an early employee. “Once in a while, if we had a customer meeting in the morning, I’d have to tell him to go home and shower.”

Navaid Farooq came from Toronto to work with them, but he soon found himself in fights with Musk. “If you want your friendship to last,” his wife Nyame told him, “this is not for you.” So he quit after six weeks. “I knew that I could either be working with him or be his friend, but not both, and the latter seemed more enjoyable.”

Errol Musk, not yet estranged from his sons, visited from South Africa and gave them $28,000 plus a beat-up car he bought for $500. Their mother, Maye, came from Toronto more often, bringing food and clothes. She gave them $10,000 and let them use her credit card because they had not been approved for one.

They got their first break when they visited Navteq, which had a database of maps. The company agreed to license it to the Musks for free until they started making a profit. Elon wrote a program that merged the maps with a listing of businesses in the area. “You could use your cursor and zoom in and move around the map,” says Kimbal. “That stuff is totally normal today, but it was mind-

blowing to see that at the time. I think Elon and I were the first humans to see it work on the internet.” They named the company Zip2, as in “Zip to where you want to go.”

Elon was granted a patent for the “interactive network directory service” that he had created. “The invention provides a network accessible service which integrates both a business directory and a map database,” the patent stated.

For their first meeting with potential investors, they had to take a bus up Sand Hill Road because the car their dad had given them broke down. But after word spread about the company, the VCs were asking to come to them. They bought a big frame for a computer rack and put one of their small computers inside, so that visitors would think they had a giant server. They named it “The Machine That Goes Ping,” after a Monty Python sketch. “Every time investors would come in, we showed them the tower,” Kimbal says, “and we would laugh because it made them think we were doing hardcore stuff.”

Maye flew from Toronto to help prepare for the meetings with venture capitalists, often staying up all night at Kinko’s to print the presentations. “It was a dollar a page for color, which we could barely afford,” she says. “We would all be exhausted except Elon. He was always up late doing the coding.” When they got their first proposals from potential investors in early 1996, Maye took her boys to a nice restaurant to celebrate. “That’s the last time we’ll have to use my credit card,” she said when she paid the bill.

And it was. They were soon astounded by an offer from Mohr Davidow Ventures to invest $3 million in the company. The final presentation to the firm was scheduled for a Monday, and that weekend Kimbal decided to make a quick trip to Toronto to fix their mother’s computer, which had broken. “We love our mom,” he explains. As he was leaving on Sunday to fly back to San Francisco, he got stopped by U.S. border officials at the airport who looked in his luggage and saw the pitch deck, business cards, and other documents for the company. Because he did not have a U.S. work visa, they wouldn’t let him board the plane. He had a friend pick him up at the airport and drive him across the border, where he told a less vigilant border officer that they were heading down to see the David Letterman show. He managed to catch the late plane from Buffalo to San Francisco, and made it in time for the pitch.

Mohr Davidow loved the presentation and finalized the investment. The firm also found an immigration lawyer to help the two Musks get work visas and gave them each $30,000 to purchase cars. Elon bought a 1967 Jaguar E-type. As a kid in South Africa, he had seen a picture of the car in a book on the best convertibles ever made, and he had vowed to buy one if he ever struck it rich. “It was the most beautiful car you could imagine,” he says, “but it broke down at least once a week.”

The venture capitalists soon did what they often do: bring in adult supervision to take over from the young founders. It had happened to Steve Jobs at Apple and to Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google. Rich Sorkin, who had run business development for an audio equipment company, was made the CEO of Zip2. Elon was moved aside to chief technology officer. At first, he thought the change would suit him; he could focus on building the product. But he learned a lesson. “I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.”

With the changes came a new strategy. Instead of marketing its product directly to businesses and their customers, Zip2 focused on selling its software to big newspapers so they could make their own local directories. This made sense; newspapers already had sales forces that were knocking on the doors of businesses to sell them advertising and classifieds. Knight-Ridder, the New York Times, Pulitzer, and Hearst newspapers signed up. Executives from the first two joined the Zip2 board. Editor & Publisher magazine ran a cover story titled “Newspaperdom’s New Superhero: Zip2,” reporting that the company had created “a new suite of software structures that would enable individual newspapers to quickly mount large-scale city guide-type directories.”

By 1997, Zip2 had been hired by 140 newspapers at licensing fees ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. The president of the Toronto Star, who had thrown a Yellow Pages book at Kimbal, called him to apologize and ask if Zip2 would be its partner. Kimbal said yes.

From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance. At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same. His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges. The Zip2 team won second place in a national Quake competition. They would have come in first, he says, but one of them crashed his computer by pushing it too hard.

When the other engineers went home, Musk would sometimes take the code they were working on and rewrite it. With his weak empathy gene, he didn’t realize or care that correcting someone publicly—or, as he put it, “fixing their fucking stupid code”—was not a path to endearment. He had never been a captain of a sports team or the leader of a gang of friends, and he lacked an instinct for camaraderie. Like Steve Jobs, he genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible. “It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. “In fact,

that’s counterproductive.”

He was toughest on Kimbal. “I love, love, love my brother very much, but working with him was hard,” Kimbal says. Their disagreements often led to rolling-on-the-office-floor fights. They fought over major strategy, minor slights, and the name Zip2. (Kimbal and a marketing firm came up with it; Elon hated it.) “Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,” Elon says. “It was part of the culture.” They had no private offices, just cubicles, so everyone had to watch. In one of their worst fights, they wrestled to the floor and Elon seemed ready to punch Kimbal in the face, so Kimbal bit his hand and tore off a hunk of flesh. Elon had to go to the emergency room for stitches and a tetanus shot. “When we had intense stress, we just didn’t notice anyone else around us,” says Kimbal. He later admitted that Elon was right about Zip2. “It was a shitty name.”

True product people have a compulsion to sell directly to consumers, without middlemen muddying things up. Musk was that way. He became frustrated by Zip2’s strategy of relegating itself to being an unbranded vendor to the newspaper industry. “We wound up beholden to the papers,” Musk says. He wanted to buy the domain name “city.com” and become a consumer destination again, competing with Yahoo and AOL.

The investors were also having second thoughts about their strategy. City guides and internet directories were proliferating by the fall of 1998, and none had shown a profit. So CEO Rich Sorkin decided to merge with one of them, CitySearch, in the hope that together they could succeed. But when Musk met with the CEO of CitySearch, the man made him uneasy. With the help of Kimbal and some of the engineers, Elon led a rebellion that scuttled the merger. He also demanded that he be made CEO again. Instead, the board removed him as chair and diminished his role.

“Great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers,” Musk told Inc. Magazine. “They don’t have the creativity or the insight.” One of the Mohr Davidow partners, Derek Proudian, was installed as interim CEO and tasked with selling the company. “This is your first company,” he told Musk. “Let’s find an acquirer and make some money, so you can do your second, third, and fourth company.”

In January 1999, less than four years after Elon and Kimbal launched Zip2, Proudian called them into his office and told them that Compaq Computer, which was seeking to juice up its AltaVista search engine, had offered $307

million in cash. The brothers had split their 12 percent ownership stake 60–40, so Elon at age twenty-seven walked away with $22 million and Kimbal with $15 million. Elon was astonished when the check arrived at his apartment. “My bank account went from, like, $5,000 to $22,005,000,” he says.

The Musks gave their father $300,000 out of the proceeds and their mother $1 million. Elon bought an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo and splurged on what for him was the ultimate indulgence: a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car, the fastest production car in existence. He agreed to allow CNN to film him taking delivery. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor, and now I’ve got a million-dollar car,” he said as he hopped around in the street while the car was unloaded from a truck.

After the impulsive outburst, he realized that the giddy display of his newfound taste for wealth was unseemly. “Some could interpret the purchase of this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,” he admitted. “My values may have changed, but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.”

Had they changed? His new wealth allowed his desires and impulses to be subject to fewer restraints, which was not always a pretty sight. But his earnest, mission-driven intensity remained intact.

The writer Michael Gross was in Silicon Valley reporting a piece for Tina Brown’s glossy Talk magazine on newly rich techno-brats. “I was looking for an ostentatious lead character who might warrant skewering,” Gross recalled years later. “But the Musk I met in 2000 was bursting with joie de vivre, too likable to skewer. He had the same insouciance and indifference to expectations he does now, but he was easy, open, charming, and funny.”

Celebrity was enticing for a kid who had grown up with no friends. “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” he told CNN. But he would end up having a conflicted relationship with wealth. “I could go and buy one of the islands of the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company,” he said. “I haven’t spent all my winnings. I’m going to put almost all of it back to a new game.”

Justine, Elon, and Maye

The family, with Errol and Maye second and third from the right

When Musk eased into the driver’s seat of his new million-dollar McLaren, he said to the CNN reporter taping the scene, “The real payoff is the sense of satisfaction in having created a company.” At that point a beautiful, willowy young woman who was his girlfriend put her arms around him. “Yes, yes, yes, but the car as well,” she cooed. “The car. Let’s be honest.” Musk seemed slightly embarrassed and looked down to check the messages on his phone.

Her name was Justine Wilson, though when he first met her at Queen’s University she was still using her more prosaic given name, Jennifer. Like Musk, she had been a bookworm as a kid, though her taste ran to dark fantasy novels rather than sci-fi. She had been raised in a small river town northeast of Toronto and fancied that she would become a writer. With flowing hair and a mysterious smile, she managed to be radiant and sultry at the same time, like a character out of the romance novel that she hoped to write someday.

She met Musk when she was a freshman and he was a sophomore at Queen’s. After seeing her at a party, he asked her out for ice cream. She agreed to go with him the following Tuesday, but when he came by her room she was gone. “What’s her favorite ice cream?” he asked a friend of hers. Vanilla-chocolatechip, he was told. So he bought a cone and walked around campus until he found her studying a Spanish text in the student center. “I think this is your favorite flavor,” he said, handing her the dripping cone.

“He’s not a man who takes no for an answer,” she says.

Justine at the time was breaking up with someone who seemed much cooler, a writer who sported a soul patch of hair on his chin. “I thought the soul patch was a dead giveaway that the guy was a douche,” says Musk. “So I convinced her to go out with me.” He told her, “You have a fire in your soul. I see myself in you.”

She was impressed by his aspirations. “Unlike other ambitious people, he never talked about making money,” she says. “He assumed that he would be either wealthy or broke, but nothing in between. What interested him were the problems he wanted to solve.” His indomitable will—whether for making her date him or for building electric cars—mesmerized her. “Even when it seemed like crazy talk, you would believe him because he believed it.”

They dated only sporadically before he left Queen’s for Penn, but they stayed in touch, and he sometimes sent her roses. She spent a year teaching in Japan and jettisoned the name Jennifer “because it was far too common and the name of a lot of cheerleaders.” When she returned to Canada, she told her sister, “If Elon ever calls me again, I think I’ll go for it. I might have missed something there.”

The call came when he visited New York City to meet with the Times about Zip2. He asked her join to him there. The weekend went so well that he invited her to fly back with him to California. She did.

He had not yet sold Zip2, so they lived in his Palo Alto apartment with two housemates and a dachshund that wasn’t housebroken named Bowie, after David. Most of the time she holed up in their bedroom writing and being antisocial. “Friends would not want to stay at my house because Justine was too grumpy,” he says. Kimbal couldn’t stand her. “If someone’s insecure, they can be very mean,” he says. When Musk asked his mother what she thought of Justine, she was typically blunt: “She has no redeeming feature.”

But Musk, who liked edginess in his relationships, was smitten. One night over dinner, Justine recalls, he asked how many kids she wanted to have. “One or two,” she answered, “although if I could afford nannies, I’d like to have four.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” he said. “I just assume that there will be nannies.” Then he rocked his arms and said, “Baby.” He was already a strong believer in having kids.

Shortly after that, he sold Zip2 and bought the McLaren. Suddenly there was money for nannies. She joked uneasily that maybe he would not dump her for a beautiful model. Instead, he got down on a bended knee on the sidewalk outside of their house, pulled out a ring, and proposed to her, just like out of a romance novel.

Both of them were energized by drama, and they thrived by fighting. “For somebody who was so amorous about me, he never hesitated to let me know that I was wrong about something,” she says. “And I would fight back. I realized that I could say anything to him, and it just did not faze him.” One day they were with a friend in a McDonald’s and started fighting loudly. “My friend was mortified, but Elon and I were used to having big arguments in public. There is a combative element to him. I don’t think you can be in a relationship with Elon and not argue.”

On a trip to Paris, they went to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musée de Cluny. Justine began describing what moved her, and she gave a spiritual interpretation involving the unicorn as a Christ-like figure. Musk called that “stupid.” They began arguing furiously about Christian symbolism. “He was just so adamant and furious that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I was stupid and crazy,” she says. “It was like the things he told me his father said to him.”

“When he told me he was going to marry her, I did an intervention,” Kimbal says. “I was like, ‘Don’t, you must not, this is the wrong person for you.’ ” Navaid Farooq, who had been with Musk at the party when he first met Justine, tried to stop him as well. But Musk loved both Justine and the turmoil. The wedding was scheduled for a weekend in January 2000 on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin.

Musk flew in the day before with a prenuptial agreement his lawyers had written. He and Justine drove around the island looking for a notary who would witness it on a Friday evening, but they couldn’t find one. She promised that she would sign it when they returned (she ended up doing so two weeks later), but the conversation sparked a lot of tension. “I think he felt very nervous about getting married and not having this thing signed,” she says. That precipitated a fight, and Justine got out of the car and walked to find some of her friends. Later that night, they got back together in the villa but continued fighting. “The villas were open-air, so all of us could hear the row,” Farooq says, “and we didn’t know what to do about it.” At one point Musk stalked out and told his mother that the wedding was off. She was relieved. “Now you won’t be miserable,” she told him. But then he changed his mind and returned to Justine.

The tension continued the next day. Kimbal and Farooq tried to convince Musk to let them whisk him away to the airport so he could escape. The more they insisted, the more intransigent he became. “No, I’m marrying her,” he declared.

On the surface, the ceremony by the hotel swimming pool seemed joyous. Justine looked radiant in a sleeveless white dress and a tiara of white flowers, and Musk looked dapper in a tailored tuxedo. Both Maye and Errol were there, and they even posed for pictures together. After dinner, everyone joined in a conga line, then Elon and Justine took the first dance. He put both arms on her waist. She put her arms around his neck. They smiled and kissed. Then, as they danced, he whispered to her a reminder: “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

With PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel

When his cousin Peter Rive visited in early 1999, he found Musk poring over books about the banking system. “I’m trying to think about what to start next,” he explained. His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ripe for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded X.com with a friend from the bank, Harris Fricker.

Musk now had the choice he had described to CNN: living like a multimillionaire or leaving his chips on the table to fund a new enterprise. The balance he struck was to invest $12 million in X.com, leaving about $4 million after taxes to spend on himself.

His concept for X.com was grand. It would be a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans. Transactions would be handled instantly, with no waiting for payments to clear. His insight was that money is simply an entry into a database, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time. “If you fix all the reasons why a consumer would take money out of the system,” he says, “then it will be the place where all the money is, and that would make it a multitrillion-dollar company.”

Some of his friends were skeptical that an online bank would inspire confidence if given a name that sounded like a porn site. But Musk loved the name X.com. Instead of being too clever, like Zip2, the name was simple, memorable, and easy to type. It also allowed him to have one of the coolest email addresses of the time: [email protected]. “X” would become his go-to letter for naming things, from companies to kids.

Musk’s management style had not changed from Zip2, nor would it ever. His late-night coding binges followed by his mix of rudeness and detachment during the day led his cofounder Harris and their handful of coworkers to demand that Musk step down as CEO. At one point Musk responded with a very self-aware email. “I am by nature obsessive-compulsive,” he wrote Fricker. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why… it’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”

Because he held a controlling interest, Musk prevailed and Fricker quit, along with most of the employees. Despite the turmoil, Musk was able to entice the influential head of Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, to make a major investment in X.com. Moritz then facilitated a deal with Barclay’s Bank and a community bank in Colorado to become partners, so that X.com could offer mutual funds,

have a bank charter, and be FDIC-insured. At twenty-eight, Musk had become a startup celebrity. In an article titled “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” Salon called him “today’s Silicon Valley It guy.”

One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that X.com would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy, and slept under his desk most nights. One of the engineers who went home at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving morning got a call from Musk at 11 a.m. asking him to come back in because another engineer had worked all night and was “not running on full thrusters anymore.” Such behavior produced drama and resentments, but also success. When the product went live that weekend, all the employees marched to a nearby ATM, where Musk inserted an X.com debit card. Cash whirred out and the team celebrated.

Believing that Musk needed adult supervision, Moritz convinced him to step aside the following month and allow Bill Harris, the former head of Intuit, to become CEO. In a reprise of what had happened at Zip2, Musk remained as chief product officer and board chair, maintaining his frenzied intensity. After one meeting with investors, he went down to the cafeteria, where he had set up some arcade video games. “There were several of us playing Street Fighter with Elon,” says Roelof Botha, the chief financial officer. “He was sweating, and you could see that he was a bundle of energy and intensity.”

Musk developed viral marketing techniques, including bounties for users who signed up friends, and he had a vision of making X.com both a banking service and a social network. Like Steve Jobs, he had a passion for simplicity when it came to designing user interface screens. “I honed the user interface to get the fewest number of keystrokes to open an account,” he says. Originally there were long forms to fill out, including providing a social security number and home address. “Why do we need that?” Musk kept asking. “Delete!” One important little breakthrough was that customers didn’t need to have user names; their email address served that purpose.

One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases.

As Musk monitored the names of new customers signing up, one caught his eye:

Peter Thiel. He was one of the founders of a company named Confinity that had been located in the same building as X.com and was now just down the street. Both Thiel and his primary cofounder Max Levchin were as intense as Musk, but they were more disciplined. Like X.com, their company offered a person-to-person payment service. Confinity’s version was called PayPal.

By the beginning of 2000, amid the first signs that the air might be coming out of the internet bubble, X.com and PayPal were engaged in a race to sign up new customers. “It was this crazy competition where we both had insane dollar bonuses to get customers to sign up and refer friends,” says Thiel. As Musk later put it, “It was a race to see who would run out of money last.”

Musk was drawn to the fight with the intensity of a video-gamer. Thiel, on the contrary, liked to coolly calculate and mitigate risk. It soon became clear to both of them that the network effect—whichever company got bigger first would then grow even faster—meant that only one would survive. So it made sense to merge rather than turning the competition into a game of Mortal Kombat.

Musk and his new CEO Bill Harris scheduled a meeting with Thiel and Levchin in the back room of Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto. The two sides traded notes about how many users each had, with Musk engaging in some of his usual exaggerations. Thiel asked him how he envisioned potential merger terms. “We would own ninety percent of the merged company and you would own ten percent,” Musk replied. Levchin was not quite sure what to make of Musk. Was he serious? They had roughly equal user bases. “He had an extremely serious I’m-not-joking look on his face, but underneath there seemed to be an ironic streak,” Levchin says. As Musk later conceded, “We were playing a game.”

After the PayPal team left the lunch, Levchin told Thiel, “This will never hunt, so let’s move on.” Thiel, however, was better at reading people. “This is just an opening,” he told Levchin. “You just have to be patient with a guy like Elon.”

The courtship continued through January 2000, causing Musk to postpone his honeymoon with Justine. Michael Moritz, X.com’s primary investor, arranged a meeting of the two camps in his Sand Hill Road office. Thiel got a ride with Musk in his McLaren.

“So, what can this car do?” Thiel asked.

“Watch this,” Musk replied, pulling into the fast lane and flooring the accelerator.

The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded. Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed. He was able to

hitch a ride up to the Sequoia offices. Musk, also unhurt, stayed behind for a half-hour to have his car towed away, then joined the meeting without telling Harris what had happened. Later, Musk was able to laugh and say, “At least it showed Peter I was unafraid of risks.” Says Thiel, “Yeah, I realized he was a bit crazy.”

Musk remained resistant to a merger. Even though both companies had about 200,000 customers signed up to make electronic payments on eBay, he believed that X.com was a more valuable company because it offered a broader array of banking services. That put him at odds with Harris, who at one point threatened to resign if Musk tried to scuttle merger talks. “If he quit, that would have been a disaster,” Musk says, “because we were trying to raise more financing just as the internet market was weakening.”

A break came when Musk had a bonding experience with Thiel and Levchin at another lunch, this one at Il Fornaio, a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in Palo Alto. They had waited a long time without being served, so Harris barged into the kitchen to see what dishes he could extract. Musk, Thiel, and Levchin looked at each other and exchanged glances. “Here was this extreme extrovert business-development type acting like he had an S on his chest, and the three of us are all very nerdy,” Levchin says. “We bonded over being the type of people who would never do what Bill did.”

They agreed to a merger in which X.com would get 55 percent of the combined company, but Musk almost ruined things soon after by telling Levchin he was getting a steal. Infuriated, Levchin threatened to pull out. Harris drove to his home and helped him fold laundry as he calmed down. The terms were revised once again, to basically a 50-50 merger, but with X.com as the surviving corporate entity. In March 2000, the deal was consummated, and Musk, the largest stockholder, became the chairman. A few weeks later, he joined with Levchin to force Harris out and regain the role of CEO as well. Adult supervision was no longer welcome.

The electronic payment systems of both companies were folded together and marketed under the brand name PayPal. That became the company’s primary offering, and it continued to grow rapidly. But it was not in Musk’s nature to make niche products. He wanted to remake entire industries. So he refocused on his original goal of creating a social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry. “We have to decide whether we are going to aim big,” he told his troops. Some believed Musk’s framing was flawed. “We had a vast amount of

traction on eBay,” says Reid Hoffman, an early employee who later cofounded LinkedIn. “Max and Peter thought we should focus entirely on that and become a master merchant service.”

Musk insisted that the company’s name should be X.com, with PayPal as merely one of its subsidiary brands. He even tried to rebrand the payment system X-PayPal. There was a lot of pushback, especially from Levchin. PayPal had become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who is helping you get paid. Focus groups showed that the name X.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering, and remains so to this day. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” he said. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.”

Musk and Michael Moritz went to New York to see if they could recruit Rudy Giuliani, who was just ending his tenure as mayor, to be a political fixer and guide them through the policy intricacies of being a bank. But as soon as they walked into his office, they knew it would not work. “It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says. “He was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.” They asked for 10 percent of the company, and that was the end of the meeting. “This guy occupies a different planet,” Musk told Moritz.

Musk restructured the company so that there was not a separate engineering department. Instead, engineers would team up with product managers. It was a philosophy that he would carry through to Tesla, SpaceX, and then Twitter. Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for dysfunction. Designers had to feel the immediate pain if something they devised was hard to engineer. He also had a corollary that worked well for rockets but less so for Twitter: engineers rather than the product managers should lead the team.

Peter Thiel drifted away from active involvement in the company, leaving his Confinity cofounder Max Levchin, a low-key and super-sharp Ukrainian-born software wizard, to be the chief technology officer and counterbalance to Musk. Levchin and Musk soon clashed on an issue that sounded technical but was also theological: whether to use Microsoft Windows or Unix as the main operating system. Musk admired Bill Gates, loved Windows NT, and thought Microsoft would be a more reliable partner. Levchin and his team were appalled, feeling that Windows NT was insecure, buggy, and uncool. They preferred using various flavors of Unix-like operating systems, including Solaris and the opensource Linux.

One night well after midnight, Levchin was working alone in a conference room when Musk walked in primed to continue the argument. “Eventually you will see it my way,” Musk said. “I know how this movie ends.”

“No, you’re wrong,” Levchin replied in his flat monotone. “It just isn’t going to work in Microsoft.”

“You know what,” said Musk. “I will arm-wrestle you for it.”

Levchin thought, correctly, that this was the stupidest imaginable way to settle a software-coding disagreement. Plus, Musk was almost twice his size. But he was loopy from working late hours and agreed to arm-wrestle. He put all his weight into it and promptly lost. “Just to be clear,” Levchin told him, “I’m not going to use your physical weight as any sort of a technical decision input.”

Musk laughed and said, “Yeah, I get it.” But he prevailed. He spent a year having his own team of engineers rewrite the Unix coding that Levchin had written for Confinity. “We wasted a year doing these technical tap dances instead of building new features,” Levchin says. The recoding effort also prevented the company from focusing on the growing amount of fraud that was plaguing the service. “The only reason we remained successful was because there were no other companies being funded during that time.”

Levchin had trouble knowing what to make of Musk. Was his arm-wrestling gambit serious? Were his bouts of maniacal intensity punctuated by goofball humor and game-playing calculated or crazed? “There’s irony in everything he does,” says Levchin. “He operates on an irony setting that goes up to eleven but never goes below four.” One of Musk’s powers was to entice other people into his irony circle so they could share an inside joke. “He turns on his irony flamethrower and creates this sense of exclusive Elon Club membership.”

That didn’t work well on Levchin, who was shielded from irony flamethrowers by his earnestness. He had a good radar for detecting Musk’s exaggerations. During the merger, Musk kept insisting that X.com had close to twice as many users, and Levchin would check with its engineers and get the real number. “Elon didn’t just exaggerate, he made it up,” Levchin says. It was what his father would have done.

And yet, Levchin began to marvel at the counterexamples, such as when Musk astounded him by knowing things. At one point Levchin and his engineers were wrestling with a difficult problem involving the Oracle database they were using. Musk poked his head in the room and, even though his expertise was with Windows and not Oracle, immediately figured out the context of the conversation, gave a precise and technical answer, and walked out without waiting for confirmation. Levchin and his team went back to their Oracle

manuals and looked up what Musk had described. “One by one, we all said, ‘Shit, he’s right,’ ” Levchin recalls. “Elon will say crazy stuff, but every once in a while, he’ll surprise you by knowing way more than you do about your own specialty. I think a huge part of the way he motivates people are these displays of sharpness, which people just don’t expect from him, because they mistake him for a bullshitter or goofball.”

13

The PayPal mafia

Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Keith Rope, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Roelof Botha; Max Levchin

Michael Moritz

By late summer of 2000, Levchin found Musk increasingly difficult to deal with. He wrote Musk long memos outlining how fraud was threatening to bankrupt the company (one of them incongruously titled “Fraud Is Love”), but all he got in response were terse dismissals. When Levchin developed the first commercial use of CAPTCHA technology to prevent automated fraud, Musk showed little interest. “It had an extremely depressive effect on me,” Levchin says. He called his girlfriend to say, “I think I’m done.”

Sitting in the lobby of a Palo Alto hotel where he was attending a conference, Levchin told a few colleagues of his plans to leave. They urged him instead to fight back. Others had similar frustrations. His close friends Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek had secretly commissioned a study that showed the PayPal brand was much more valuable than X.com’s. Musk was furious and ordered the PayPal brand to be stripped from most of the company’s website. By early September, all three, along with Reid Hoffman and David Sacks, had decided it was time to dethrone Musk.

Musk had married Justine eight months earlier, but he had not found time to go on a honeymoon. Fatefully, he decided to take one that September, just when his colleagues were plotting against him. He flew to Australia to attend the Olympics, with stops to meet potential investors in London and Singapore.

As soon as he left, Levchin telephoned Thiel and asked if he would come back as CEO, at least on a temporary basis. When Thiel said yes, the rebel group agreed to join hands and confront the board, enlisting other employees to sign a petition supporting their cause.

Thus armed and fortified, Thiel and Levchin and their compatriots caravanned up Sand Hill Road to Sequoia Capital’s office to present their case to Michael Moritz. Moritz thumbed through the folder with the petition, then asked some specific questions about the software and fraud problems. He agreed that a change was necessary, but said he would support Thiel as CEO only if it was temporary; the company needed to begin a process of recruiting a seasoned top executive. The plotters agreed and headed off to a local dive bar, Antonio’s Nut House, to celebrate.

Musk began to sense a problem during some of his phone calls from Australia. As usual, he would issue command decisions, but now his normally cowed lieutenants began pushing back. He figured out why four days into his trip, when he was copied on an email sent to the board by an employee who extolled Musk’s leadership and denounced the plotters. Musk felt blindsided. “This whole thing is making me so sad that words fail me,” he emailed. “I have

given every last ounce of effort, almost all my cash from Zip2 and put my marriage on the rocks, and yet I stand accused of bad deeds to which I have not even been given an opportunity to respond.”

Musk called Moritz to try to reverse his decision. “He described the coup as being ‘heinous,’ ” says Moritz, who has a refined literary sensibility. “I remember, because most people don’t use this word. He labeled it a heinous crime.” When Moritz refused to back down, Musk quickly bought plane tickets—the only seats he and Justine could get were in coach—and headed home. When he got back to the X.com office, he huddled with some of his loyalists to figure out ways to fend off the coup. After a session that lasted late into the night, he retreated to the video-game consoles in the office and played round after round of Street Fighter by himself.

Thiel warned executives not to answer Musk’s calls; he could be too persuasive or intimidating. But Reid Hoffman, the chief operating officer, felt he owed Musk a conversation. A bearlike entrepreneur with a jovial personality, Hoffman knew Musk’s wiles. “He has reality-warp powers where people get sucked into his vision,” he says. Nevertheless, he decided to meet Musk for lunch.

The lunch lasted three hours as Musk tried to persuade and cajole Hoffman. “I took all of my money and put it in this company,” he said. “I have the right to run it.” He also argued against the strategy of focusing just on electronic payments. “That should be only an opening act for creating a real digital bank.” He had read Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma, and tried to convince Hoffman that the staid banking industry could be disrupted. Hoffman disagreed. “I told him that I believed his vision of a superbank was toxic, because we needed to focus on our payment service on eBay,” he says. Musk then switched tacks: he tried to persuade Hoffman to become the CEO. Eager to end the lunch, Hoffman agreed to think about it, but quickly decided he wasn’t interested. He was a Thiel loyalist.

When the board voted to remove Musk as CEO, he responded with a calm and grace that surprised those who had watched his feverish struggle to prevail. “I’ve decided that the time has come to bring in a seasoned CEO to take X.com to the next level,” he wrote in an email to his fellow workers. “After that search is done, my plan is to take a sabbatical for about three to four months, think through a few ideas, and then start a new company.”

Although a street fighter, Musk had an unexpected ability to be realistic in defeat. When Jeremy Stoppelman, a Musk acolyte who would later be a founder of Yelp, asked whether he and others should resign in protest, Musk said no. “The company was my baby, and like the mother in the Book of Solomon, I was willing to give it up so it could survive,” Musk says. “I decided to work hard at

repairing the relationship with Peter and Max.”

The one remaining source of tension was Musk’s desire, as he put it in his email, to “do some PR.” He had been bitten by the celebrity bug, and he wanted to be a public face of the company. “I’m really the best spokesperson for the company,” he told Thiel during a tense meeting in Moritz’s office. When Thiel rejected the idea, Musk erupted. “I don’t want to have my honor impugned,” he shouted. “My honor is worth more than this company to me.” Thiel was baffled about why this was a matter of honor. “He was very dramatic,” Thiel recalls. “People don’t usually talk with such a superheroic, almost Homeric kind of vibe in Silicon Valley.” Musk remained the largest shareholder and a member of the board, but Thiel barred him from speaking for the company.

For the second time in three years, Musk had been pushed out of a company. He was a visionary who didn’t play well with others.

What struck his colleagues at PayPal, in addition to his relentless and rough personal style, was his willingness, even desire, to take risks. “Entrepreneurs are actually not risk takers,” says Roelof Botha. “They’re risk mitigators. They don’t thrive on risk, they never seek to amplify it, instead they try to figure out the controllable variables and minimize their risk.” But not Musk. “He was into amplifying risk and burning the boats so we could never retreat from it.” To Botha, Musk’s McLaren crash was like a metaphor: floor it and see how fast it goes.

That made Musk fundamentally different from Thiel, who always focused on limiting risks. He and Hoffman once planned to write a book on their experience at PayPal. The chapter on Musk was going to be titled “The Man Who Didn’t Understand the Meaning of the Word ‘Risk.’ ” Risk addiction can be useful when it comes to driving people to do what seems impossible. “He’s amazingly successful getting people to march across a desert,” Hoffman says. “He has a level of certainty that causes him to put all of his chips on the table.”

That was more than just a metaphor. Many years later, Levchin was at a friend’s bachelor pad hanging out with Musk. Some people were playing a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ’Em. Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table. “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” Levchin says. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said, ‘Right, fine, I’m done.’ ” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.

That would turn out to be a good strategy. “Look at the two companies he went on to build, SpaceX and Tesla,” says Thiel. “Silicon Valley wisdom would be that these were both incredibly crazy bets. But if two crazy companies work that everyone thought couldn’t possibly work, then you say to yourself, ‘I think Elon understands something about risk that everybody else doesn’t.’ ”

PayPal went public in early 2002 and was acquired by eBay that July for $1.5 billion. Musk’s payout was around $250 million. Afterward, he called up his nemesis Max Levchin and suggested they get together in the company parking lot. Levchin, a small and wiry guy who had occasionally harbored vague fears that Musk might one day beat him up, replied half-jokingly, “You want to have a fist fight behind the school?” But Musk was sincere. He sat on the curb looking sad and asked Levchin, “Why did you turn on me?”

“I honestly believed it was the right thing to do,” Levchin replied. “You were completely wrong, the company was about to die, and I felt I had no other choice.” Musk nodded. A few months later, they had dinner in Palo Alto. “Life’s too short,” Musk told him. “Let’s move on.” He did the same with Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and some of the other coup leaders.

“I was pretty angry at first,” Musk told me in the summer of 2022. “I had thoughts of assassination running through my head. But eventually I realized that it was good I got couped. Otherwise I’d still be slaving away at PayPal.” Then he paused for a few moments and let out a little laugh. “Of course, if I had stayed, PayPal would be a trillion-dollar company.”

There was a coda. At the time of this conversation, Musk was in the midst of buying Twitter. As we walked in front of a high bay where his Starship rocket was being prepared for a test, he returned to the topic of what his grand vision for X.com had been. “That’s what Twitter could become,” he said. “If you combine a social network with a payments platform, you could create what I wanted X.com to be.”

Musk’s ouster as PayPal CEO allowed him to have a true vacation, the first time that he had a weeklong holiday from work. It would also be the last time. He was not made for vacations.

Along with Justine and Kimbal, he went to Rio to see his cousin Russ Rive, who had moved there after marrying a Brazilian woman. From there they went to South Africa to attend the wedding of another relative. It was Musk’s first time back after leaving the country eleven years earlier at age seventeen.

Justine had a tough time dealing with Elon’s father and grandmother, known as Nana. She had gotten a henna tattoo of a gecko on her leg while in Rio, and it had not yet faded. Nana told Elon that she was a “Jezebel,” referring to the biblical woman whose name became associated with sexually promiscuous or controlling women. “That was the first time I’d ever even heard a woman refer to another woman as a Jezebel,” Justine says. “I guess the tattoo of the gecko didn’t help.” They escaped Pretoria as soon as they could for a safari at a high-end game preserve.

After getting back to Palo Alto in January 2001, Musk started feeling dizzy. His ears were ringing, and he had recurring waves of chills. So he went to the Stanford Hospital emergency room, where he started throwing up. A spinal tap showed he had a high white blood cell count, which led the doctors to diagnose him with viral meningitis. It’s generally not a severe disease, so the doctors rehydrated him and sent him home.

Over the next few days he felt progressively worse and at one point was so weak he could barely stand. So he called a taxi and went to a doctor. When she tried to take his pulse, it was barely perceptible. So she called an ambulance, which took him to Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City. A doctor who was an expert in infectious diseases happened to walk past Musk’s bed and realized that he had malaria, not meningitis. It turned out to be falciparum malaria, the most dangerous form, and they had caught it just in time. After symptoms become severe, as they had in Musk’s case, patients often have only a day or so before the parasite becomes untreatable. He was put into intensive care, where doctors stabbed a needle into his chest for intravenous infusions followed by massive doses of doxycycline.

The head of human resources at X.com went to visit Musk in the hospital and sort out his health insurance. “He was actually only hours from death,” the executive wrote in an email to Thiel and Levchin. “His doctor had treated two cases of falciparum malaria prior to treating Elon—both patients died.” Thiel remembers that he had a morbid conversation with the HR director after learning that Musk had taken out, on behalf of the company, a key-man life insurance policy for $100 million. “If he had died,” Thiel says, “all of our financial problems were going to be solved.” It was typical of Musk’s outsized personality to take out such a large insurance policy. “We’re happy that he survived and that gradually everything tracked for the company, so we didn’t need the hundred million life insurance policy.”

Musk remained in intensive care for ten days, and he did not fully recover for five months. He took two lessons from his near-death experience: “Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to destroy me.”

After his ouster from PayPal, Musk bought a single-engine turboprop and decided to learn how to fly, like his father and grandparents had done. In order to get his pilot’s license, he needed fifty hours of training, which he crammed into two weeks. “I tend to do things very intensely,” he says. He had an easy time with the Visual Flight Rules test, but he failed his first Instrument Flight Rules test. “You have a hood on, so you can’t see outside, and you have half your instruments covered,” he says. “Then they shut down one engine, and you have to land the plane. I landed it, but the instructor said, ‘Not good enough. Fail.’ ” On the second try, he passed.

That emboldened him to take the crazy step of buying a Soviet Bloc military jet built in Czechoslovakia called the Aero L-39 Albatros. “It’s what they used to train their fighter pilots, so it’s incredibly acrobatic,” he says. “But it’s a bit dicey, even for me.” At one point he and his trainer took it on a low-altitude flight over Nevada. “It was just like in Top Gun. You’re no more than a couple of hundred feet above the ground, following the contour of the mountains. We did a vertical climb up the side of a mountain and then turned upside down.”

The flying appealed to his daredevil gene. It also helped him visualize aerodynamics better. “It’s not just a simple Bernoulli’s principle,” he says as he launches into an explanation of how wings lift a moving plane. After about five hundred hours of flying in the L-39 and other planes, he got a bit bored with it. But the allure of flight remained.

On Labor Day weekend of 2001, soon after he had recovered from malaria, Musk went to visit his party pal from Penn, Adeo Ressi, in the Hamptons. Afterward, driving back to Manhattan on the Long Island Expressway, they talked about what Musk would do next. “I’ve always wanted to do something in space,” he told Ressi, “but I don’t think there’s anything that an individual can do.” It was too expensive, of course, for a private person to build a rocket.

Or was it? Exactly what were the basic physical requirements? All that was needed, Musk figured, was metal and fuel. Those didn’t really cost that much. “By the time we reached the Midtown Tunnel,” Ressi says, “we decided that it was possible.”

When he got to his hotel that evening, Musk logged onto the NASA website to read about its plans for going to Mars. “I figured it had to be soon, because we went to the moon in 1969, so we must be about to go to Mars.” When he

couldn’t find the schedule, he rummaged deeper on the site, until he realized that NASA had no plans for Mars. He was shocked.

In his Google searches for more information, he happened across an announcement for a dinner in Silicon Valley hosted by an organization called the Mars Society. That sounds cool, he said to Justine, and he bought a pair of $500 tickets. In fact, he ended up sending in a check for $5,000, which caught the attention of Robert Zubrin, the society’s president. Zubrin sat Elon and Justine at his table, along with the film director James Cameron, who had directed the space-war thriller Aliens as well as The Terminator and Titanic. Justine sat next to him: “It was a big thrill for me because I was a huge fan, but he mainly talked to Elon about Mars and why humans would be doomed if they didn’t colonize other planets.”

Musk now had a new mission, one that was loftier than launching an internet bank or digital Yellow Pages. He went to the Palo Alto public library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts, asking to borrow their old engine manuals.

At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.”

Reid Hoffman, another PayPal veteran, had a similar reaction. After listening to Musk describe his plan to send rockets to Mars, Hoffman was puzzled. “How is this a business?” he asked. Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didn’t think that way. “What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially,” he says. “That’s what makes him a force of nature.”

It’s useful to pause for a moment and note how wild it was for a thirty-year-old entrepreneur who had been ousted from two tech startups to decide to build rockets that could go to Mars. What drove him, other than an aversion to vacations and a childlike love of rockets, sci-fi, and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? To his bemused friends at the time, and consistently in conversations over the ensuing years, he gave three reasons.

He found it surprising—and frightening—that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide. America had gone to the moon. But then came the grounding of the Shuttle missions and an end to progress. “Do we want to tell our children that going to the moon is the best we

did, and then we gave up?” he asks. Ancient Egyptians learned how to build the pyramids, but then that knowledge was lost. The same happened to Rome, which built aqueducts and other wonders that were lost in the Dark Ages. Was that happening to America? “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves,” he would say in a TED Talk a few years later. “It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”

Another motivation was that colonizing other planets would help ensure the survival of human civilization and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet. It may someday be destroyed by an asteroid or climate change or nuclear war. He had become fascinated by Fermi’s Paradox, named after the Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi, who in a discussion of alien life in the universe said, “But where is everyone?” Mathematically it seemed logical there were other civilizations, but the lack of any evidence raised the uncomfortable possibility that the Earth’s human species might be the only example of consciousness. “We’ve got this delicate candle of consciousness flickering here, and it may be the only instance of consciousness, so it’s essential we preserve it,” Musk says. “If we are able to go to other planets, the probable lifespan of human consciousness is going to be far greater than if we are stuck on one planet that could get hit by an asteroid or destroy its civilization.”

His third motivation was more inspirational. It came from his heritage in a family of adventurers and his decision as a teenager to move to a country that had bred into its essence the spirit of pioneers. “The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he says. “This is a land of adventurers.” That spirit needed to be rekindled in America, he felt, and the best way to do that would be to embark on a mission to colonize Mars. “To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult, and people will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States. But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.” Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.”

Faring to other planets would be, Musk believed, one of the significant advances in the story of humanity. “There are only a handful of really big milestones: single-celled life, multicellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life extending from the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness,” he says. “On that scale, the next important step is obvious: making life multiplanetary.” There was something exhilarating, and also a bit unnerving, about Musk’s ability to see his endeavors as having epoch-making significance. As Max Levchin drily puts it, “One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven.”

Musk decided that, if he wanted to start a rocket company, it was best to move to Los Angeles, which was home to most of the aerospace companies, including Lockheed and Boeing. “The probability of success for a rocket company was quite low, and it was even lower if I did not move to Southern California, where the critical mass of aerospace engineering talent was.” He didn’t explain the move to Justine, who thought it was because he was attracted to the celebrity glamour of the city. Because of their marriage, he was eligible to become a U.S. citizen, which he did in early 2002 at an oath-taking ceremony with thirty-five hundred other immigrants at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.

Musk began gathering rocket engineers for meetings at a hotel near the Los Angeles airport. “My initial thought was not to create a rocket company, but rather to have a philanthropic mission that would inspire the public and lead to more NASA funding.”

His first plan was to build a small rocket to send mice to Mars. “But I became worried that we would end up with a tragicomic video of mice slowly dying on a tiny spaceship.” That would not be good. “So then it came down to, ‘Let’s send a little greenhouse to Mars.’ ” The greenhouse would land on Mars and send back photographs of green plants growing on the red planet. The public would be so excited, the theory went, that it would clamor for more missions to Mars. The proposal was called Mars Oasis, and Musk estimated he could pull it off for less than $30 million.

He had the money. The biggest challenge was getting an affordable rocket that could take the greenhouse to Mars. There was, it turned out, a place where he might be able to get one cheaply, or so he thought. Through the Mars Society, Musk heard of a rocket engineer named Jim Cantrell, who had worked on a U.S.–Russian program to decommission missiles. A month after his Long Island Expressway ride with Adeo Ressi, Musk gave Cantrell a call.

Cantrell was driving in Utah with the top down on his convertible, “so all I could make out was that some guy named Ian Musk was saying that he was an internet millionaire and needed to talk to me,” he later told Esquire. When Cantrell got home and was able to call him back, Musk explained his vision. “I want to change mankind’s outlook on being a multiplanetary species,” he said. “Can we meet this weekend?” Cantrell had been leading a cloak-and-dagger life because of his dealings with Russian authorities, so he wanted to meet in a safe place without guns. He suggested they meet at the Delta Air Lines club at the Salt Lake City airport. Musk brought Ressi, and they came up with a plan to go to Russia to see if they could buy some launch slots or rockets.

The lunch in the back room of a drab Moscow restaurant consisted of small bites of food interspersed with large shots of vodka. Musk had arrived that morning with Adeo Ressi and Jim Cantrell on their quest to buy a used Russian rocket for their mission to Mars, and he was ragged after a late night of partying during a stopover in Paris. Plus, he was not an experienced drinker, so he didn’t fare well. “I calculated the weight of the food and the weight of the vodka, and they were roughly equal,” he recalls. After many toasts to friendship, the Russians gave the Americans gifts of vodka bottles with labels that had each person’s image on a rendering of Mars. Musk, who was holding his head up with his hand, passed out, and his head slammed into the table. “I don’t think I impressed the Russians,” he says.

That evening, slightly recovered, Musk and his companions met with another group in Moscow that purported to be selling decommissioned missiles. That encounter turned out to be equally bizarre. The Russian in charge was missing a front tooth, so whenever he spoke loudly, which was often, spit would fly out in Musk’s direction. At one point, when Musk started his talk about the need to make humans multiplanetary, the Russian got visibly upset. “This rocket was never meant for capitalists to use it for going to Mars on a bullshit mission,” he shouted. “Who’s your chief engineer?” Musk allowed that he was. At that point, Cantrell recalls, the Russian spit at them.

“Did he just spit on us?” Musk asked.

“Yeah, he did,” Cantrell answered. “I think it’s a sign of disrespect.”

Despite the clown show, Musk and Cantrell decided to return to Russia in early 2002. Ressi didn’t come, but Justine did. So did a new member of the team, Mike Griffin, an aerospace engineer who later became the administrator of NASA.

This time Musk focused on buying two Dnepr rockets, which were old missiles. The more he negotiated, the higher the price went. He finally thought he had a deal to pay $18 million for two Dneprs. But then they said no, it was $18 million for each. “I’m like, ‘Dude, that’s insane,’ ” he says. The Russians then suggested maybe it would be $21 million each. “They taunted him,” Cantrell recalls. “They said, ‘Oh, little boy, you don’t have the money?’ ”

It was fortunate that the meetings went badly. It prodded Musk to think bigger. Rather than merely using a secondhand rocket to put a demonstration greenhouse on Mars, he would conceive a venture that was far more audacious, one of the most audacious of our times: privately building rockets that could

launch satellites and then humans into orbit and eventually send them to Mars and beyond. “I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”

As he stewed about the absurd price the Russians wanted to charge, he employed some first-principles thinking, drilling down to the basic physics of the situation and building up from there. This led him to develop what he called an “idiot index,” which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques.

Rockets had an extremely high idiot index. Musk began calculating the cost of carbon fiber, metal, fuel, and other materials that went into them. The finished product, using the current manufacturing methods, cost at least fifty times more than that.

If humanity was going to get to Mars, the technology of rockets must radically improve. And relying on used rockets, especially old ones from Russia, was not going to push the technology forward.

So on the flight home, he pulled out his computer and started making spreadsheets that detailed all of the materials and costs for building a midsize rocket. Cantrell and Griffin, sitting in the row behind him, ordered drinks and laughed. “What the fuck do you think that idiot-savant is doing up there?” Griffin asked Cantrell.

Musk turned around and gave them an answer. “Hey, guys,” he said, showing them the spreadsheet, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.” When Cantrell looked at the numbers, he said to himself, “I’ll be damned—that’s why he’s been borrowing all my books.” Then he asked the flight attendant for another drink.

When Musk decided he wanted to start his own rocket company, his friends did what true friends do in such a situation: they staged an intervention.

“Whoa, dude, ‘I got screwed by the Russians’ does not equal ‘create a launch company,’ ” Adeo Ressi told him. Ressi made a highlight reel of dozens of rockets blowing up, and he corralled friends to fly to Los Angeles, where they gathered with Musk to talk him out of it. “They made me watch a reel of rockets exploding, because they wanted to convince me that I would lose all my money,”

Musk says.

The arguments about the risk served to strengthen Musk’s resolve. He liked risk. “If you’re trying to convince me this has a high probability of failure, I am already there,” he told Ressi. “The likeliest outcome is that I will lose all my money. But what’s the alternative? That there be no progress in space exploration? We’ve got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on Earth forever.”

It was a rather grandiose mandate-from-heaven assessment of how indispensable he was to the progress of humankind. But like many of Musk’s most laughable assertions, it contained a kernel of truth. “I wanted to hold out hope that humans could be a space-faring civilization and be out there among the stars,” he says. “And there was no chance of that unless a new company was started to create revolutionary rockets.”

Musk’s space adventure had begun as a nonprofit endeavor to inspire interest in a mission to Mars, but now he had the combination of motivations that would mark his career. He would do something audacious that was driven by a grand idea. But he also wanted it to be practical and profitable, so that it could sustain itself. That meant using the rockets to launch commercial and government satellites.

He decided to start with a smaller rocket that would not be too costly. “We’re going to be doing dumb things, but let’s just not do dumb things on a large scale,” he told Cantrell. Instead of launching large payloads, as Lockheed and Boeing did, Musk would create a less expensive rocket for the smaller satellites that were being made possible by advances in microprocessors. He focused on one key metric: what it cost to get each pound of payload into orbit. That goal of maximizing boost for the buck would guide his obsession with increasing the thrust of the engines, reducing the mass of the rockets, and making them reusable.

Musk tried to recruit the two engineers who had accompanied him to Moscow. But Mike Griffin did not want to move to Los Angeles. He was working for In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture firm based in the Washington, DC, area, and he was looking at a promising future in science policy. Indeed, President George W. Bush appointed him to be NASA administrator in 2005. Jim Cantrell considered joining, but he asked for a lot of job guarantees that Musk was unwilling to meet. So Musk ended up being, by default, the company’s chief engineer.

Musk incorporated Space Exploration Technologies in May 2002. At first he called the company by its initials, SET. A few months later, he highlighted his favorite letter by moving to a more memorable moniker, SpaceX. Its goal, he said in an early presentation, was to launch its first rocket by September 2003 and to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2010. Thus continued the tradition he

had established at PayPal: setting unrealistic timelines that transformed his wild notions from being completely insane to being merely very late.

Fathers and Sons

Los Angeles, 2002

Errol, Kimbal, and Elon

Just as Elon was launching SpaceX in May 2002, Justine gave birth to their first child, a boy, named Nevada because he had been conceived at the annual Burning Man festival held in that state. When he was ten weeks old, the whole family went to Laguna Beach, just south of Los Angeles, for a cousin’s wedding. During the reception, a manager at the hotel came in looking for the Musks. Something had happened to their baby, he said.

When they got back to the room, paramedics were intubating Nevada and giving him oxygen. The nanny explained that he had been sleeping in his crib, on his back, and at some point had stopped breathing. The cause was probably Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, an unexplained malady that is the leading cause of infant mortality in developed countries. “By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been deprived of oxygen for so long that he was braindead,” Justine later said.

Kimbal rode to the hospital with Elon, Justine, and the baby. Even though he had been declared brain-dead, Nevada was kept on life support for three days. When they finally made the decision to turn off the breathing machine, Elon felt his last heartbeat and Justine held him in her arms and felt his death rattle. Musk sobbed uncontrollably. “He cried like a wolf,” his mother says. “Cried like a wolf.”

Because Elon said he could not bear returning home, Kimbal arranged for them to stay at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The manager gave them the presidential suite. Elon asked him to get rid of Nevada’s clothes and toys, which had been brought to the hotel. It was three weeks before Musk could bear to go home and see what had once been his son’s room.

Musk processed his grief silently. Navaid Farooq, his friend from Queen’s University, flew to Los Angeles and stayed with him right after he returned home. “Justine and I tried to draw him into conversations about what happened, but he did not want to talk about it,” Farooq says. Instead, they watched movies and played video games. At one point, after a long silence, Farooq asked, “How are you feeling? How are you dealing with it?” Musk completely shut down the conversation. “I’ve known him long enough to read his face,” Farooq says. “I could tell he was determined not to talk about it.”

Justine, on the contrary, was very open about her emotions. “He wasn’t very comfortable with me expressing my feelings over Nevada’s death,” she says. “He told me I was being emotionally manipulative, wearing my heart on my sleeve.” She attributes his emotional repression to the defense mechanisms he developed during childhood. “He shuts down emotions when in dark places,” she says. “I

think it’s a survival thing with him.”

When Nevada was born, Elon invited his father to fly from South Africa to see his grandson. It offered Elon a chance, thirteen years after he left South Africa, to reconcile with Errol, or at least to exorcise some demons. “Elon was Dad’s first son, and maybe he had something to prove to him,” Kimbal says.

Errol brought his new wife, their two young children, and his wife’s three children from her previous marriage. Elon paid for all seven tickets. When they arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, after the first leg of their flight from Johannesburg, Errol was paged by a Delta Air Lines representative. “We have some bad news,” he was told. “Your son wants us to tell you that Nevada, your grandson, has died.” Elon wanted to make sure the airline representative broke the news because he could not bear to speak the words himself.

When Errol got on the phone, Kimbal explained the situation and said, “Dad, you shouldn’t come.” He tried to convince him to turn around and fly back to South Africa. Errol refused. “No, we’re already in the U.S., so we are coming to Los Angeles.”

Errol remembers being astounded at the size of the penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire, “probably the most amazing thing I have ever seen.” Elon seemed to be in a trance, but he was also very needy, in a complex way. He was uncomfortable having his blustery father see him in such a vulnerable state, but he also did not want him to leave. He ended up urging his father and his new family to stay in Los Angeles. “I don’t want you to go back,” he said. “I will buy you a house here.”

Kimbal was appalled. “No, no, no, this is a bad idea,” he told Elon. “You’re forgetting that he’s a dark human. Do not do this, do not do this to yourself.” But the harder he tried to talk his brother out of it, the sadder Elon got. Years later, Kimbal wrestled with what yearnings were motivating his brother. “Watching his own son die, I think that that was what drove him to want his father near him,” he told me.

Elon bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his brood, along with the biggest Land Rover he could find, and he arranged for the children to be put into good schools and chauffeured there each day. But things quickly got weird. Elon was getting concerned that Errol, who was then fifty-six, was becoming uncomfortably attentive to one of his stepdaughters, Jana, who was then fifteen.

Elon became furious at his father because of what he perceived as his inappropriate behavior, and he had developed a deep sympathy—and tugging

sense of kinship—for Errol’s stepchildren. He knew what they had to live with. So he offered to buy Errol a yacht to be harbored forty-five minutes from Malibu. If he agreed to live there on his own, he could see his family on weekends. That was not only a weird idea but also a bad one. It made the whole situation stranger. Errol’s wife, who was nineteen years younger than he, began deferring to Elon. “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me,” Errol says, “and so it became a problematic situation.”

One day when Errol was on the boat, he got a message from Elon. “This situation is not working,” he said, and he asked Errol to go back to South Africa. Errol did. A few months later, his wife and family moved back as well. “I tried threats, rewards, and arguments to change my father for the better,” Elon later said. “And he—” Musk breaks off for a long period of silence. “No way, it just got worse.” Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.

Revving Up SpaceX, 2002

Tom Mueller

As a kid growing up in rural Idaho, Tom Mueller loved playing with model rockets. “I made dozens. Of course, they didn’t last long, because I’d always crash them or blow them up.”

His hometown of Saint Maries (population 2,500) was a logging village about a hundred miles south of the Canadian border. His father worked as a lumberjack. “As a kid, I was always helping Dad work on his log truck, using the welders and other tools,” Mueller says. “Being hands-on gave me a feel for what would work and what wouldn’t.”

Lanky and sinewy with a dimpled chin and jet-black hair, Mueller had the rough-hewn look of a future lumberjack. But inside he was studious like Musk. He immersed himself in the local library devouring science fiction. For a middleschool project, he put crickets inside a model rocket and blasted it off from his backyard to see what affect acceleration would have on them. He learned another lesson instead. The parachutes failed, the rocket smashed to Earth, and the crickets died.

At first, he bought rocket kits through the mail, but then he began making his own from scratch. When he was fourteen, he converted his father’s welding torch into an engine. “I injected water into it to see what affect doing that had on its performance,” he says. “That’s kind of a crazy thing—adding water gives you more thrust.”

The project won him second prize at a regional science fair, which qualified him to go to the international finals in Los Angeles. It was the first time he had been on an airplane. “I didn’t come close to winning,” he says. “There were robots and stuff that the other kids’ fathers had built. At least I had done my project myself.”

He worked his way through the University of Idaho by spending summers and weekends as a logger. When he graduated, he moved to Los Angeles to seek work in aerospace. His grades had not been great, but his enthusiasm was infectious, and that helped get him a job at TRW, which built the rocket engine that allowed astronauts to land the moon. On weekends he would go to the Mojave Desert to test big homemade rockets with fellow members of the Reaction Research Society, a club of rocket enthusiasts founded in 1943. There he partnered with a fellow member, John Garvey, to build what became the world’s most powerful amateur rocket engine, weighing eighty pounds.

One Sunday in January 2002, while they were working in a rented warehouse on their amateur engine, Garvey mentioned to Mueller that an internet

millionaire named Elon Musk wanted to meet him. When Musk arrived accompanied by Justine, Mueller was shouldering the suspended eighty-pound engine as he tried to bolt it to a frame. Musk began peppering him with questions. How much thrust did it have? Thirteen thousand pounds, Mueller answered. Have you ever made anything bigger? Mueller explained that at TRW he had been working on the TR-106, which had 650,000 pounds of thrust. What were its propellant fuels? Musk asked. Mueller finally quit bolting his engine so he could concentrate on Musk’s rapid-shot questions.

Musk asked Mueller whether he could build an engine as big as TRW’s TR-106 on his own. Mueller allowed that he had designed the injector and igniter himself, knew the pump system well, and with a team could figure out the rest. How much, Musk asked, would it cost? Mueller replied that TRW was doing it for $12 million. Musk repeated his question. How much would it cost? “Oh, my Lord, that’s a tough one,” answered Mueller, who was surprised by how fast the conversation had gotten into specifics.

At that point Justine, who was wearing a full-length leather coat, nudged Musk and said it was time to go. He asked Mueller if they could meet the following Sunday. Mueller was reluctant. “It was Super Bowl Sunday, and I had just gotten a widescreen TV and wanted to watch the game with some friends.” But he sensed it was futile to resist, so he agreed to have Musk over.

“We watched like maybe one play, because we were so engaged in talking about building a launch vehicle,” Mueller says. Along with a few other engineers there, they sketched plans for what became the first SpaceX rocket. The first stage, they decided, would be propelled by engines using liquid oxygen and kerosene. “I know how to make that work easy,” Mueller said. Musk suggested hydrogen peroxide for the upper stage, which Mueller thought would be difficult to handle. He countered by suggesting nitrogen tetroxide, which Musk considered too expensive. They ended up agreeing to do liquid oxygen and kerosene on the second stage as well. The football game was forgotten. The rocket was more interesting.

Musk offered Mueller the job of head of propulsion, in charge of designing the rocket’s engines. Mueller, who had been complaining about the risk-averse culture at TRW, consulted with his wife. “You’ll kick yourself if you don’t do this,” she told him. Mueller thus became SpaceX’s first hire.

One thing that Mueller insisted on was that Musk put two years’ worth of compensation into escrow. He was not an internet millionaire, and he did not want to take the chance of being unpaid if the venture failed. Musk agreed. It did, however, cause him to consider Mueller an employee rather than a cofounder of SpaceX. It was a fight he had regarding PayPal and would have again involving Tesla. If you’re unwilling to invest in a company, he felt, you

shouldn’t qualify as a founder. “You cannot ask for two years of salary in escrow and consider yourself a cofounder,” he says. “There’s got to be some combination of inspiration, perspiration, and risk to be a cofounder.”

Once Musk was able to enlist Mueller and a few other engineers, he needed a headquarters and factory. “We had been meeting in hotel conference rooms,” Musk says, “so I started driving through the neighborhoods where most of the aerospace companies are, and I found an old warehouse right near the L.A. airport.” (The SpaceX headquarters and the adjoining Tesla design studio are technically in Hawthorne, a town within Los Angeles County next to the airport, but I will refer to the location as Los Angeles.)

In laying out the factory, Musk followed his philosophy that the design, engineering, and manufacturing teams would all be clustered together. “The people on the assembly line should be able to immediately collar a designer or engineer and say, ‘Why the fuck did you make it this way?’ ” he explained to Mueller. “If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you pull it right off, but if it’s someone else’s hand on the stove, it will take you longer to do something.”

As his team grew, Musk infused it with his tolerance for risk and realitybending willfulness. “If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.” It was a good way to drive people to do what they thought was impossible. But it was also a good way to become surrounded by people afraid to give you bad news or question a decision.

Musk and the other young engineers would work late into the night and then fire up a multiplayer shooter game, such as Quake III Arena, on their desktop computers, conference together their cell phones, and plunge into death matches that could last until 3 a.m. Musk’s handle was Random9, and he was (of course) the most aggressive. “We’d be screaming and yelling at each other like a bunch of lunatics,” said one employee. “And Elon was right there in the thick of it with us.” He was usually triumphant. “He’s alarmingly good at these games,” said another. “He has insanely fast reactions and knew all the tricks and how to sneak up on people.”

Musk named the rocket they were building Falcon 1, after the spacecraft from Star Wars. He left it to Mueller to name its engines. He wanted cool names, not just letters and numbers. An employee at one of the contractors was a falconer, and she listed the different species of that bird. Mueller picked “Merlin” for the engines on the first stage and “Kestrel” for those on the second stage.

SpaceX, 2002–2003

Test stand in McGregor, Texas

Musk was laser-focused on keeping down costs. It was not simply because his own money was on the line, though that was a factor. It was also because costeffectiveness was critical for his ultimate goal, which was to colonize Mars. He challenged the prices that aerospace suppliers charged for components, which were usually ten times higher than similar parts in the auto industry.

His focus on cost, as well as his natural controlling instincts, led him to want to manufacture as many components as possible in-house, rather than buy them from suppliers, which was then the standard practice in the rocket and car industries. At one point SpaceX needed a valve, Mueller recalls, and the supplier said it would cost $250,000. Musk declared that insane and told Mueller they should make it themselves. They were able to do so in months at a fraction of the cost. Another supplier quoted a price of $120,000 for an actuator that would swivel the nozzle of the upper-stage engines. Musk declared it was not more complicated than a garage door opener, and he told one of his engineers to make it for $5,000. Jeremy Hollman, one of the young engineers working for Mueller, discovered that a valve that was used to mix liquids in a car wash system could be modified to work with rocket fuel.

After a supplier delivered some aluminum domes that go on top of the fuel tanks, it jacked up the price for the next batch. “It was like a painter who paints half your house for one price, then wants three times that for the rest,” says Mark Juncosa, who became Musk’s closest colleague at SpaceX. “That didn’t make Elon too enthusiastic.” Musk referred to it as “going Russian” on him, as the rocket hucksters in Moscow had done. “Let’s go do this ourselves,” he told Juncosa. So a new part of the assembly facility was added to build domes. After a few years, SpaceX was making in-house 70 percent of the components of its rockets.

When SpaceX began producing its first Merlin engines, Musk asked Mueller how much they weighed. About a thousand pounds, Mueller responded. The Tesla Model S engine, Musk said, weighed about four thousand pounds and cost about $30,000 to make. “So if the Tesla engine is four times as heavy as your engine, why does yours cost so fucking much?”

One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his

engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ ” says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceX’s vice president of launch and testing. “And we would say, ‘There is a military specification that says it’s a requirement.’ And he’d reply, ‘Who wrote that? Why does it make sense?’ ” All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

When Mueller was working on the Merlin engines, he presented an aggressive schedule for completing one of the versions. It wasn’t aggressive enough for Musk. “How the fuck can it take so long?” he asked. “This is stupid. Cut it in half.”

Mueller balked. “You can’t just take a schedule that we already cut in half and then cut it in half again,” he said. Musk looked at him coldly and told him to stay behind after the meeting. When they were alone, he asked Mueller whether he wanted to remain in charge of engines. When Mueller said he did, Musk replied, “Then when I ask for something, you fucking give it to me.”

Mueller agreed and arbitrarily cut the schedule in half. “And guess what?” he says. “We ended up developing it in about the time that we had put in that original schedule.” Sometimes Musk’s insane schedules produced the impossible, sometimes they didn’t. “I learned never to tell him no,” Mueller says. “Just say you’re going to try, then later explain why if it doesn’t work out.”

Musk insisted on setting unrealistic deadlines even when they weren’t necessary, such as when he ordered test stands to be erected in weeks for rocket engines that had not yet been built. “A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle,” he repeatedly declared. The sense of urgency was good for its own sake. It made his engineers engage in first-principles thinking. But as Mueller points out, it was also corrosive. “If you set an aggressive schedule that people think they might be able to make, they will try to put out extra effort,” he says. “But if you give them a schedule that’s physically impossible, engineers aren’t stupid. You’ve demoralized them. It’s Elon’s biggest weakness.”

Steve Jobs did something similar. His colleagues called it his reality-distortion field. He set unrealistic deadlines, and when people balked, he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.” Although the

practice demoralized people, they ended up accomplishing things that other companies couldn’t. “Even though we failed to meet most schedules or cost targets that Elon laid out, we still beat all of our peers,” Mueller admits. “We developed the lowest-cost, most awesome rockets in history, and we would end up feeling pretty good about it, even if Dad wasn’t always happy with us.”

Musk took an iterative approach to design. Rockets and engines would be quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised, and tried again, until finally something worked. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. “It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”

For example, there was a set of military specifications on how many hours each new version of an engine needed to be test-fired under a long list of different conditions. “It was a tedious approach and very expensive,” Tim Buzza explains. “Elon told us just to build one engine and fire it up on the test stand; if it worked, put it on a rocket and fly it.” Because SpaceX was a private company, and because Musk was willing to flout rules, it could take the risks it wanted. Buzza and Mueller pushed their engines until they broke, and then said, “Okay, now we know what the limits are.”

This belief in iterative design meant that SpaceX needed a freewheeling place for testing. At first they considered the Mojave Air and Space Port, but a county board kept delaying a decision on SpaceX’s application in late 2002. “We need to get the hell out of Mojave,” Mueller told Musk. “California is difficult.”

Musk gave a talk that December at Purdue, which has a renowned rockettesting program, and he brought with him Mueller and Buzza. There they met an engineer who had worked for Beal Aerospace, one of the many private rocket companies that had gone bankrupt. He described Beal’s abandoned test site outside of McGregor, Texas, about twenty-six miles east of Waco, and gave them the cell number of a former employee who still lived in the area.

Musk decided they should fly there that day. On the way, they called the former employee, Joe Allen, and reached him at Texas State Technical College, where he was studying computer coding after losing his job at Beal. Allen had never heard of Musk or SpaceX, but he agreed to meet them under a tripod on the old testing site. When they landed in Musk’s jet, they had no trouble finding the tripod in the desert. It was 110 feet tall. At its base was Allen, standing next to his beat-up old Chevy pickup.

“Holy crap,” Mueller muttered to Buzza as they walked the site. “Almost everything we need is here.” There were test stands and water systems and a

block house amid the scrubby grass. Buzza started to enthuse about how well the facility could work. Musk pulled him aside. “Stop saying how good all this is,” he said. “You’re making it more expensive.” Musk ended up hiring Allen on the spot and was able to lease the McGregor site and its abandoned equipment for a mere $45,000 a year.

Thus began a buddy movie in which a platoon of die-hard rocket engineers, led by Mueller and Buzza with occasional visits by Musk, ignited engines and set off explosions, which they dubbed “rapid unscheduled disassemblies,” in a hardscrabble patch of concrete and rattlesnakes in the Texas desert.

The first test firing of a Merlin came on the night of Mueller’s birthday, March 11, 2003. The kerosene and liquid oxygen was injected into the thrust chamber and burned for just half a second, which was all they needed to assure that the mechanisms worked. They celebrated with a $1,000 bottle of Rémy Martin cognac, which had been a gift to Musk for speaking at a space conference. His assistant, Mary Beth Brown, had given it to Mueller to use when a suitable cause for celebration arose. They polished it off from paper cups.

Mueller and his team would spend twelve-hour days testing engines at McGregor, grab dinner at Outback Steakhouse, then have a late-night conference call with Musk, who peppered them with technical questions. Often he would erupt with the controlled yet searing fury of an engine burn when an engineer did not know an answer. With his tolerance for risk, Musk pushed them to find makeshift solutions. Using machine tools that Mueller had brought to Texas, they would try to make fixes on the spot.

One night lightning struck a test stand, knocking out the pressurization system for a fuel tank. That led to a bulge and rip in one of the tank’s membranes. In a normal aerospace company, that would have meant replacing the tanks, which would take months. “Nah, just fix it,” Musk said. “Go up there with some hammers and just pound it back out, weld it, and we’ll keep going.” Buzza thought that was nuts, but he had learned to follow the boss’s orders. So they went out to the test stand and pounded out the bulge. Musk jumped on his plane to make the three-hour flight to oversee things personally. “When he showed up, we began testing the tank with gas in it, and it held,” Buzza says. “Elon believes that every situation is salvageable. That taught us a lot. And it actually was fun.” It also saved SpaceX months in getting its initial rocket tested.

Of course that didn’t always work. Musk tried a similar unconventional approach in late 2003 when cracks developed in the heat-diffusing material inside the thrust chambers of the engines. “First one, then two, then three of our

first chambers cracked,” Mueller recalls. “It was a disaster.”

When Musk got the bad news, he ordered Mueller to find a way to fix them. “We can’t throw them away,” he said.

“There’s no way to fix them,” Mueller replied.

It was the type of statement that infuriated Musk. He told Mueller to put the three chambers on his jet and fly with them to the SpaceX factory in Los Angeles. His idea was to apply a layer of epoxy glue that would seep into the cracks and cure the problem. When Mueller told him that the idea was crazy, they got into a shouting match. Finally, Mueller relented. “He’s the boss,” he told the team.

When the chambers arrived at the factory, Musk was dressed in fine leather boots for a Christmas party he was planning to attend. He never got to the party. He spent all night helping to apply the epoxy and ruining his boots.

The gamble failed. As soon as pressure was applied, the epoxy came unstuck. The chambers had to be redesigned, and the schedule for launch slipped four months. But Musk’s willingness to work all night at the factory pursuing the innovative idea inspired his engineers not to be afraid of trying offbeat fixes.

A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up. The residents in the area got used to explosions. The cows, however, did not. Like pioneers circling the wagons, they would run in a circle protecting the young calves in the center when a big bang happened. The engineers at McGregor set up what they called a “cow cam” so they could watch.

SpaceX, 2002–2003

Gwynne Shotwell

Musk does not naturally partner with people, either personally or professionally. At Zip2 and PayPal, he showed he could inspire, frighten, and sometime bully colleagues. But collegiality was not part of his skill set and deference not in his nature. He does not like to share power.

One of the few exceptions was his relationship with Gwynne Shotwell, who joined SpaceX in 2002 and eventually became its president. She has worked with Musk, sitting in a cubicle right next to his at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, for more than twenty years, longer than anyone else.

Direct, sharp-spoken, and bold, she prides herself on being “mouthy” without crossing the line into disrespect, and she has the pleasant confidence of the high-school basketball player and cheerleading captain she once was. Her easygoing assertiveness allows her to speak honestly to Musk without rankling him and to push back against his excesses while not nannying him. She can treat him almost like a peer but still show deference, never forgetting that he’s the founder and boss.

Born Gwynne Rowley, she grew up in a suburban village north of Chicago. When she was a sophomore in high school, she went with her mother to a panel of the Society of Women Engineers, where she became fascinated by a well-dressed mechanical engineer who had her own construction business. “I want to be like her,” she said, and decided to apply to the engineering school at nearby Northwestern University. “I applied because of Northwestern’s richness in other fields,” she later told students there. “I was terrified of being tagged as a nerd. Now I’m super proud to be one.”

As she was walking to a job interview with IBM’s Chicago-area office in 1986, she stopped to watch a television in a store window that was broadcasting the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard. What was supposed to be an inspirational moment turned to horror when the Challenger exploded a minute after takeoff. Shotwell was so shaken that she didn’t get the job. “I must have really sucked eggs on the interview.” Eventually she was hired by Chrysler in Detroit, then moved to California, where she became head of space systems sales for Microcosm Inc., a startup consulting firm in the same neighborhood as SpaceX.

At Microcosm she worked with an adventurous, rugged-faced German engineer named Hans Koenigsmann, who met Musk at one of the weekend gatherings of rocket-launching hobbyists in the Mojave Desert. Musk subsequently went to his house to recruit him, and in May 2002 he became SpaceX’s fourth employee.

To help him celebrate, Shotwell took Koenigsmann to their favorite neighborhood lunch place, a bright-yellow Austrian restaurant called Chef Hannes. Then she drove Koenigsmann a few blocks down the street to drop him off at SpaceX. “Come on in,” he told her. “You can meet Elon.”

She found herself impressed with Musk’s ideas for reducing the costs of rockets and making the parts in-house. “He knew the details,” she says. But she thought the team was clueless about how to sell its services. “The guy you have doing discussions with possible customers is a loser,” she told him bluntly.

The next day she got a call from Musk’s assistant, who said that he wanted to talk to her about becoming vice president of business development. Shotwell had two kids, was going through a divorce, and was about to turn forty. The idea of joining a risky startup run by a mercurial millionaire did not have much appeal. She spent three weeks considering it before concluding that SpaceX had the potential to transform the sclerotic rocket industry into something that was innovative. “I’ve been a fucking idiot,” she told him. “I’ll take the job.” She became the company’s seventh employee.

Shotwell has a special insight that helps her when dealing with Musk. Her husband has the autism-spectrum disorder commonly called Asperger’s. “People like Elon with Asperger’s don’t take social cues and don’t naturally think about the impact of what they say on other people,” she says. “Elon understands personalities very well, but as a study, not as an emotion.”

Asperger’s can make a person seem to lack empathy. “Elon is not an ass, and yet sometimes he will say things that are very assholey,” she says. “He just doesn’t think about the personal impact of what he’s saying. He just wants to fulfill the mission.” She does not try to change him, just salve people who get singed. “Part of my job is to tend to the wounded,” she says.

It also helps that she is an engineer. “I’m not at his level, but I’m not an idiot. I understand the stuff he’s saying,” she says. “I listen hard, take him seriously, read his intentions, and try to achieve what he wants, even if what he is saying seems crazy initially.” When she insists to me that “he tends to be right,” it can sound as if she’s a sycophant, but she actually isn’t. She speaks her mind to him and gets annoyed at those who don’t. She names a couple of them and says, “They work their asses off, but they are chickenshits around Elon.”

A few months after she joined SpaceX in 2003, Shotwell and Musk traveled to Washington. Their goal was to win a contract from the Defense Department to launch a new breed of small tactical communications satellites, known as TacSat, that would allow commanders of ground forces to get imagery and other data

quickly.

They went to a Chinese restaurant near the Pentagon, and Musk broke his tooth. Embarrassed, he kept putting his hand over his mouth, until she started laughing at him. “It was the funniest thing, watching him try to hide it.” They were able to find a late-night dentist who made a temporary cap so that Musk would be presentable for their Pentagon meeting the next morning. There they sealed the contract, SpaceX’s first, for $3.5 million.

To drum up public awareness about SpaceX, Musk in December 2003 brought a Falcon 1 rocket to Washington for a public event outside of the National Air and Space Museum. SpaceX built a special trailer with a bright blue cradle to haul the seven-story rocket from Los Angeles, and Musk ordered a production crunch with a crazy deadline to get a prototype of the rocket ready for the trip. To many of the company’s engineers, this seemed like a mammoth distraction, but when the rocket was paraded up Independence Avenue with a police escort, it impressed Sean O’Keefe, the administrator of NASA. He dispatched one of his deputies, Liam Sarsfield, to California to assess the spunky startup. “SpaceX presents good products and solid potential,” Sarsfield reported back. “NASA investment in this venture is well warranted.”

Sarsfield admired Musk’s hunger for information on highly technical issues, ranging from the docking system of the International Space Station to the ways that engines can overheat. They engaged in an extended email correspondence on these and other issues. But in February 2004, the exchange grew testy when NASA awarded a $227 million contract, without competitive bidding, to a rival private rocket company, Kistler Aerospace. The contract was for rockets that could resupply the International Space Station, something that Musk (rightly, as it turned out) thought SpaceX could do.

Sarsfield made the mistake of giving Musk an honest explanation. Kistler had been awarded the no-bid contract, he wrote, because its “financial arrangements are shaky” and NASA did not want it to go bankrupt. There would be other contracts for SpaceX to bid on, Sarsfield assured Musk. That infuriated Musk, who contended that NASA should be in the business of promoting innovation, not propping up companies.

Musk met with officials at NASA headquarters in May 2004 and, ignoring the advice of Shotwell, decided to sue them over the Kistler contract. “Everyone told me that it might mean we would never be able to work with NASA,” Musk says. “But what they did was wrong and corrupt, so I sued.” He even threw Sarsfield, his strongest advocate within NASA, under the bus by including in the lawsuit his friendly email explaining that the contract was meant to be a lifeline for Kistler.

SpaceX ended up winning the dispute, and NASA was ordered to open the

project to competitive bidding. SpaceX was able to win a significant portion of it. “That was a huge upset—literally imagine, like, a ten-to-one odds underdog winning,” Musk told the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport. “It blew everyone’s mind.”

The victory was crucial not only for SpaceX but for the American space program. It promoted an alternative to the “cost-plus” contracts that NASA and the Defense Department had generally been using. Under those contracts, the government kept control of a project—such as building a new rocket or engine or satellite—and issued detailed specifications of what it wanted done. It would then award contracts to big companies such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin, which would be paid all of their costs plus a guaranteed profit. This approach became standard during World War II to give the government complete control over the development of weapons and to prevent the perception that contractors were war-profiteering.

On his trip to Washington, Musk testified before a Senate committee and pushed a different approach. The problem with a cost-plus system, he argued, was that it stymied innovation. If the project went over budget, the contractor would get paid more. There was little incentive for the cozy club of cost-plus contractors to take risks, be creative, work fast, or cut costs. “Boeing and Lockheed just want their cost-plus gravy trains,” he says. “You just can’t get to Mars with that system. They have an incentive never to finish. If you never finish a cost-plus contract, then you suckle on the tit of the government forever.”

SpaceX pioneered an alternative in which private companies bid on performing a specific task or mission, such as launching government payloads into orbit. The company risked its own capital, and it would be paid only if and when it delivered on certain milestones. This outcomes-based, fixed-price contracting allowed the private company to control, within broad parameters, how its rockets were designed and built. There was a lot of money to be made if it built a cost-efficient rocket that succeeded, and a lot of money to be lost if it failed. “It rewards results rather than waste,” Musk says.

Jeffrey Brian Straubel—known as JB—was a corn-fed and clean-cut Wisconsin kid with a chipmunk-cheek smile who, as a thirteen-year-old car nerd, refurbished the motor of a golf cart and fell in love with electric vehicles. He also liked chemistry. In high school he did an experiment with hydrogen peroxide that blew up in his family basement, leaving a permanent scar on his otherwise cherubic face.

While studying energy systems at Stanford, he interned with a high-spirited and puckish New Orleans–born entrepreneur, Harold Rosen, who designed the geostationary satellite Syncom for Hughes Aircraft. Rosen and his brother Ben were trying to build a hybrid car with a flywheel that would generate electricity. Straubel tried something simpler. He converted an old Porsche into an allelectric vehicle powered by traditional lead-acid car batteries. It had headsnapping acceleration, but its range was only thirty miles.

After Rosen’s electric car company failed, Straubel moved to Los Angeles. One night in the late summer of 2003, he played host to six exhausted and smelly students from Stanford’s solar car team, who had just completed a Chicago-to– Los Angeles race in a car powered by solar panels.

They ended up talking most of the night, and their discussion turned to lithium-ion batteries, which were used in laptops. They packed a lot of power and could be strung together in large numbers. “What if we could put a thousand or ten thousand together?” Straubel asked. They figured out that a lightweight car with a half-ton of batteries might just be able to make it across America. As dawn broke, they went into the backyard with some lithium-ion cells and hit them with hammers so they would explode. It was a celebration of the future, and they made a pact. “We’ve got to do this,” Straubel said.

Unfortunately, no one was interested in funding him. Until he met Elon Musk.

In October 2003, Straubel attended a seminar at Stanford where Musk, who had started SpaceX the year before, was a speaker. His talk touted the need for entrepreneurial space activities “led by the spirit of free enterprise.” That prompted Straubel to push forward at the end and offer to arrange a meeting with Harold Rosen. “Harold was a legend in the space industry, so I invited them to come visit the SpaceX factory,” Musk says.

The factory tour did not go well. Rosen, then seventy-seven, was jovial and self-assured as he pointed out the parts of Musk’s design that would fail. When they went to lunch at a nearby McCormick and Schmick’s seafood restaurant,

Musk reciprocated by denouncing as “stupid” Rosen’s latest idea, which was building electric drones to deliver internet service. “Elon is quick to form opinions,” Straubel says. Musk remembers the intellectual sparring fondly. “It was a great conversation because Harold and JB are very interesting people, even though the idea was dumb.”

Eager to keep the conversation going, Straubel changed the topic to his idea for building an electric vehicle using lithium-ion batteries. “I was looking for funding and being rather shameless,” he says. Musk expressed surprise when Straubel explained how good the batteries had become. “I was going to work on high-density energy storage at Stanford,” Musk told him. “I was trying to think of what would have the most effect on the world, and energy storage along with electric vehicles were high on my list.” His eyes lit up as he processed Straubel’s calculations. “Count me in,” he said, committing to provide $10,000 in funding.

Straubel suggested that Musk talk to Tom Gage and Alan Cocconi, who had cofounded a small company, AC Propulsion, that was pursuing the same idea. They had built a fiberglass prototype, which they dubbed the tzero, and Straubel called to urge them to give Musk a ride. Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, also suggested that they talk to Musk. So in January 2004, Gage sent Musk an email. “Sergei Brin and JB Straubel both suggested you might be interested in driving our tzero sports car,” he wrote. “We ran it against a Viper last Monday and it won 4 of 5 sprints on a ⅛ mile track. I lost one because I was carrying a 300 lb cameraman. Do you have time for me to bring it by?”

“Sure,” Musk responded. “I would really enjoy seeing it. Don’t think it could beat my McLaren (yet), though.”

“Hmm, a McLaren, boy that would be a feather in my cap,” Gage wrote back. “I can have it there on Feb 4th.”

Musk was blown away by the tzero, even though it was a rough prototype without doors or a roof. “You have to turn this into a real product,” he told Gage. “That could really change the world.” But Gage wanted to start by building a cheaper, boxier, slower car. That made no sense to Musk. Any initial version of an electric car would be expensive to build, at least $70,000 apiece. “Nobody is going to pay anywhere near that for something that looks like crap,” he argued. The way to get a car company started was to build a high-priced car first and later move to a mass-market model. “Gage and Cocconi were sort of madcap inventors,” he laughs. “Common sense was not their strong suit.”

For weeks Musk badgered them to build a fancy roadster. “Everyone thinks electric cars suck, but you can show that they don’t,” he implored. But Gage resisted. “Okay, if you guys don’t want to commercialize tzero, do you mind if I do?” Musk asked.

Gage assented. He also made a fateful suggestion: Musk should partner with a pair of car enthusiasts down the street who had a similar idea. And that was how Musk ended up meeting with two people who had gone through a comparable experience with AC Propulsion and had decided to start their own car company, which they had registered under the name Tesla Motors.

When Martin Eberhard, a lanky Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a lean face and high-voltage personality, was getting over a bad divorce in 2001, he decided he should, as he described it, “be like every other guy going through a midlife crisis and buy myself a sports car.” He could afford a nice one because he had started and sold a company that made the first popular Kindle predecessor, the Rocket eBook. But he didn’t want a car that burned gasoline. “Climate change had become real to me,” he says, “plus I felt we kept fighting wars in the Middle East because of our need for oil.”

Being methodical, he created a spreadsheet that calculated the energy efficiency of different types of cars, starting with the raw fuel source. He compared gasoline, diesel, natural gas, hydrogen, and electricity from various sources. “I worked through the exact math each step of the way, from when fuels come out of the ground to when they power the car.”

He discovered that electric cars, even in places where the electricity was generated from coal, were the best for the environment. So he decided to buy one. But California had just gutted its mandate that auto companies offer some zero-emission vehicles, and General Motors quit making its EV1. “That really shook me up,” he says.

Then he read about the tzero prototype made by Tom Gage and AC Propulsion. After seeing it, he told Gage he would invest $150,000 in the company if they would switch from lead-acid batteries to lithium-ion. The result was that Gage had a prototype tzero in September 2003 that could accelerate from zero to sixty in 3.6 seconds and had a range of three hundred miles.

Eberhard tried to convince Gage and the others at AC Propulsion to start manufacturing the car, or at least build him one. But they didn’t. “They were smart people, but I soon realized that they were incapable of actually building cars,” Eberhard says. “That’s when I decided I had to start a car company of my own.” He made a deal to license the electric motors and drivetrain from AC Propulsion.

He enlisted his friend Marc Tarpenning, a software engineer who had been his partner at Rocket eBook. They devised a plan to start with a high-end, openbody, two-seat roadster and later build cars for the mass market. “I wanted to

make a sporty roadster that would absolutely change the way that people think about electric cars,” Eberhard said, “and then use it to build a brand.”

But what should that brand be? One night, while on a dinner-date at Disneyland, he was obsessing, somewhat unromantically, about what to name the new company. Because the car was going to use what was called an induction motor, he came up with the idea of naming it after the inventor of that device, Nikola Tesla. The next day, he had coffee with Tarpenning and asked his opinion. Tarpenning whipped out his laptop, went online, and registered the name. In July 2003, they incorporated the company.

Eberhard faced a problem. He had an idea and a name, but he had no funding. Then, in March 2004, he got a call from Tom Gage. The two had made an agreement that they would not compete for each other’s investors. When it became clear that Musk was not going to invest in AC Propulsion, Gage offered him to Eberhard. “I’m giving up on Elon,” he said. “You should give him a call.”

Eberhard and Tarpenning had met Musk earlier, when they had gone to hear him speak at a Mars Society meeting in 2001. “I buttonholed him afterwards just to say hi, like a fanboy,” Eberhard recalls.

He mentioned that encounter in an email to Musk asking for a meeting. “We would love to talk to you about Tesla Motors, particularly if you might be interested in investing,” he wrote. “I believe that you have driven AC Propulsion’s tzero car. If so, you already know that a high-performance electric car can be made. We would like to convince you that we can do so profitably.”

That evening Musk replied, “Sure.”

Eberhard came down from Palo Alto to Los Angeles that week, accompanied by a colleague, Ian Wright. The meeting, in Musk’s cubicle at SpaceX, was supposed to last a half-hour, but Musk kept peppering them with questions while occasionally shouting over to his assistant to cancel his next meeting. For two hours they shared their visions for a supercharged electric car, discussing the details of everything from the drivetrain and motor to the business plan. At the end of the meeting, Musk said he would invest. When they got outside the SpaceX building, Eberhard and Wright exchanged high-fives. After a follow-up meeting that included Tarpenning, they agreed that Musk would lead the initial financing round with a $6.4 million investment and become chair of the board.

What struck Tarpenning was that Musk focused on the importance of the mission rather than the potential of the business: “He clearly had already come to the conclusion that to have a sustainable future we had to electrify cars.” Musk

had a couple of requests. The first was that the paperwork had to be done quickly, because his wife Justine was pregnant with twins, and a C-section had been scheduled for a week later. He also asked Eberhard to get in touch with JB Straubel. Having invested in both Straubel’s enterprise and Eberhard’s, Musk thought they should work together.

Straubel, who had never heard of Eberhard or his fledgling Tesla enterprise, rode his bicycle over and came away skeptical. But Musk called him and urged him to join forces. “Come on, you’ve got to do this,” Musk told him. “It will be a perfect fit.”

The pieces thus came together for what would become the world’s most valuable and transformative automobile company: Eberhard as CEO, Tarpenning as president, Straubel as chief technology officer, Wright as chief operating officer, and Musk as the chair of the board and primary funder. Years later, after many bitter disputes and a lawsuit, they agreed that all five of them would be called cofounders.

Straubel takes Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for a test drive in a Roadster

One of the most important decisions that Elon Musk made about Tesla—the defining imprint that led to its success and its impact on the auto industry—was that it should make its own key components, rather than piecing together a car with hundreds of components from independent suppliers. Tesla would control its own destiny—and quality and costs and supply chain—by being vertically integrated. Creating a good car was important. Even more important was creating the manufacturing processes and factories that could mass-produce them, from the battery cells to the body.

But that’s not the way the company began. Just the opposite.

When producing their Rocket eBook, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning had outsourced the manufacturing process. Likewise, when it came time to make Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, they decided to cobble it together from components made by outside suppliers. In a decision that would come to haunt Tesla, Eberhard decided that Tesla would get batteries in Asia and car bodies in England and drivetrains from AC Propulsion and a transmission from Detroit or Germany.

This was in line with the prevailing trends in the auto industry. In the early days of Henry Ford and other pioneers, carmakers did most of the work inhouse. But beginning in the 1970s, the companies spun off their parts-makers and upped their reliance on suppliers. From 1970 to 2010, they went from producing 90 percent of the intellectual property in their vehicles to about 50 percent. That made them dependent on far-flung supply chains.

After Eberhard and Tarpenning decided to outsource the building of the car’s body and chassis, they went to the Los Angeles Auto Show, invited themselves into the booth of the boutique British sports car maker Lotus, and cornered one of the executives. “He was a polite British guy and couldn’t find a way to tell us to go away,” Eberhard says. “When we were done, he was intrigued enough to invite us to the U.K.” They eventually agreed to a deal in which Lotus would supply a slightly modified version of the body of its spritely Elise roadster, and then Tesla would equip it with an electric engine and powertrain from AC Propulsion.

By January 2005, the eighteen engineers and mechanics at Tesla had cobbled together by hand what was known as a development mule, a vehicle that could be shown off and tested before being put into production. “To make a mule required a lot of hacking and slashing in order to jam our batteries and the AC Propulsion powertrain into a Lotus Elise,” Musk says. “But at least we had a thing that looked like a real car. It actually had doors and a roof, unlike the

tzero.

Straubel got to take the first test ride. When he touched the accelerator, it bolted forward like a startled horse, amazing even its engineers. Eberhard’s turn came next, and tears came to his eyes as he gripped the wheel. After Musk took his turn zipping around and marveling at the car’s super-quick but silent acceleration, he agreed to invest $9 million more in the company.

One issue with startups, especially those with multiple founders and funders, is who should be in charge. Sometimes the alpha male wins, as when Steve Jobs marginalized Steve Wozniak and when Bill Gates did the same to Paul Allen. At other times it’s messier, especially when different players feel that they are the founder of a company.

Both Eberhard and Musk considered themselves to be the main founder of Tesla. In Eberhard’s mind, he had come up with the idea, enlisted his friend Tarpenning, registered a company, chosen a name, and gone out and found funders. “Elon called himself the chief architect and all kinds of things, but he wasn’t,” Eberhard says. “He was just a board member and investor.” But in Musk’s mind, he was the one who put Eberhard together with Straubel and provided the funding needed to start the company. “When I met Eberhard and Wright and Tarpenning, they had no intellectual property, no employees, nothing. All they had was a shell corporation.”

At first this difference in perspective was not a big problem. “I was running SpaceX,” Musk says, “and I had no desire to also run Tesla.” He was happy, at least initially, to be the board chair and let Eberhard be CEO. But as the person who owned most of the equity, Musk had ultimate authority, and it was not in his nature to defer. Especially when it came to engineering decisions, he became increasingly involved. Tesla’s leadership team thus became an inherently unstable molecule.

For the first year or so, Musk and Eberhard got along. Eberhard handled the daily management of Tesla at its headquarters in Silicon Valley. Musk spent most of his time in Los Angeles and made visits only about once a month for board meetings or important design reviews. His questions tended to be technical, probing into the details of the battery pack, motor, and materials. He was not known for gushing emails, but one night early in their relationship, after working on a problem together, he sent one to Eberhard: “The number of great product people in the world is tiny and I think you are one of them.” They talked most days, exchanged emails at night, and occasionally socialized. “I was never his drinking buddy,” Eberhard says, “but we were in each other’s houses every now

and then and went out to eat.”

Alas, they were too much alike for the buddy movie to last. Both were hard-driving, high-strung, detail-oriented engineers who could be brutally dismissive of those they considered fools. The problems began when Eberhard had a fallingout with Ian Wright, who had been part of the founding team. Their disagreements became so intense that each tried to convince Musk to fire the other. It was a tacit acknowledgment by Eberhard that Musk had the ultimate say. “Martin and Ian were telling me why the other one is a demon and needs to be thrown out,” Musk says. “They are saying, ‘Elon, you must make a choice.’ ”

Musk called Straubel for advice. “Okay, who should we pick here?” he asked. Straubel replied that neither choice was great, but when pressed he advised, “Maybe Martin is the lesser of two evils.” Musk ended up firing Wright, but the situation deepened his doubts about Eberhard. It also prompted him to become more involved in the management of Tesla.

As Musk began to pay more attention to Tesla, he could not refrain from getting involved in design and engineering decisions. He would fly up from Los Angeles every couple of weeks, chair a design review meeting, inspect models, and suggest improvements. Being Musk, however, he did not consider his ideas to be mere suggestions. He bristled when they were not carried out. This was a problem, because the company’s business plan called for cobbling together a body from Lotus and other suppliers without making major changes. “We had planned to do the minimal possible modifications,” Tarpenning says, “at least until Elon got more involved.”

Eberhard tried to resist most of Musk’s suggestions, even if they would make the car better, because he knew they would increase costs and cause delays. But Musk argued that the only way to jump-start Tesla was to roll out a roadster that wowed customers. “We only get to release our first car once, so we want it to be as good as it can be,” he told Eberhard. At one of the review meetings, Musk’s face darkened, his stare turned cold, and he declared that the car looked cheap and ugly. “We couldn’t have a crappy-looking car and sell it for around a hundred thousand dollars,” he later said.

Although his expertise was computer software, not industrial design, he began putting a lot of time into the aesthetics of the Roadster. “I had never designed a car before, so I was studying every great car and trying to understand what made it special,” he says. “I agonized over all the details. He would later proudly note that he was honored by the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena for his work on the Roadster.

One major design revision that Musk made was to insist that the door of the Roadster be enlarged. “In order to get in the car, you had to be a dwarf mountain climber or a master contortionist,” he says. “It was insane, farcical.” The six-foot-two-inch Musk found he had to swing his rather large butt into the seat, fold himself into nearly a fetal position, then try to swing his legs in. “If you’re going on a date, how is a woman even going to get in the car?” he asked. So he ordered that the bottom of the door’s frame be lowered three inches. The resulting redesign of the chassis meant that Tesla could not use the crash-test certification that Lotus had, which added $2 million to the production costs. Like many of Musk’s revisions, it was both correct and costly.

Musk also ordered that the seats be made wider. “My original idea was to use the same seat structures that Lotus used,” Eberhard says. “Otherwise, we would have to redo all the testing. But Elon felt that the seats were too narrow for his wife’s butt or something. I got a skinny butt, and I kind of miss the narrow seats.”

Musk also decided that the original Lotus headlights were ugly because they had no cover or shield. “It made the car look bug-eyed,” he says. “The lights are like the eyes of a car, and you have to have beautiful eyes.” That change would add another $500,000 to the production costs, he was told. But he was adamant. “If you’re buying a sports car, you’re buying it because it’s beautiful,” he told the team. “So this is not a small deal.”

Instead of the fiberglass composite material that Lotus used, Musk decided that the Roadster body should be made from stronger carbon fiber. That made it costlier to paint, but it also made it lighter while feeling more solid. Over the years, Musk was able to use techniques learned at SpaceX and apply them to Tesla, and vice versa. When Eberhard pushed back on the cost of carbon fiber, Musk sent him an email. “Dude, you could make the body panels for at least 500 cars worth per year if you bought the soft oven we have at SpaceX!” he wrote. “If someone tells you this is hard, they are full of shit. You can make high quality composites in the oven in your home.”

No detail was too small to escape Musk’s meddling. The Roadster originally had ordinary door handles, the kind that click open a latch. Musk insisted on electric handles that would operate with a simple touch. “Somebody who’s buying a Tesla Roadster will buy it whether it has ordinary door latches or electric ones,” Eberhard argued. “It’s not going to add a single unit to our sales.” It was an argument he had made about most of Musk’s design changes. Musk prevailed, and electric door handles became a cool feature that helped define the magic of Tesla. But as Eberhard warned, it added yet another cost.

Eberhard finally got pushed to despair when, near the end of the design process, Musk decided that the dashboard was ugly. “This is a major issue and

I’m deeply concerned that you do not recognize it as such,” Musk wrote. Eberhard tried to put him off, begging that they deal with the issue later. “I just don’t see a path—any path at all—to fixing it prior to start of production without a significant cost and schedule hit,” he wrote. “I stay up at night worrying about simply getting the car into production sometime in 2007…. For my own sanity’s sake and for the sanity of my team, I am not spending a lot of cycles thinking about the dashboard.” Many people over the years would make similar pleas to Musk, few of them successfully. In this case, Musk relented. Improving the dashboard could wait until after the first cars entered production. But it didn’t help Musk and Eberhard’s relationship.

By modifying so many elements, Tesla lost the cost advantages that came from simply using a crash-tested Lotus Elise body. It also added to the supplychain complexity. Instead of being able to rely on Lotus’s existing suppliers, Tesla became responsible for finding new sources for hundreds of components, from the carbon fiber panels to the headlights. “I was driving the Lotus people crazy,” Musk says. “They kept asking me why I was being so hardcore about every little curve of this car. And what I told them was, ‘Because we have to make it beautiful.’ ”

Musk’s modifications may have made the car more beautiful, but they also burned through the company’s cash. In addition, he repeatedly pushed Eberhard to hire more people so that the company could move faster. By May 2006, it had seventy employees, and it needed another round of financing from investors.

Tarpenning was acting as the company’s chief financial officer, even though his expertise was in computer software and not finance. He had the unenviable task of telling Musk at a board meeting that they were running out of money. “This was sooner than we had originally planned, largely because we had been making these hires that Elon pushed for,” Tarpenning recalls. “So Elon totally loses it.”

During the tirade, Elon’s brother Kimbal, who was on the board, reached into his satchel and looked through the budget presentations from the previous five meetings. “Elon,” he quietly interjected, “if you take away the costs of the six unbudgeted new hires that you pushed for, then they would actually still be right on target.” Musk paused, looked at the spreadsheets, and conceded the point. “Okay,” he said, “I guess we should figure out how to raise more financing.” Tarpenning says he felt like hugging Kimbal.

In Silicon Valley at the time, there was a tight-knit and hard-partying community of young entrepreneurs and tech bros who had become startup

millionaires, and Musk had become one of its stars. He enlisted some of his friends to invest, including Antonio Gracias, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Skoll, Nick Pritzker, and Steve Jurvetson. But board members encouraged him to broaden the network and seek financing from one of the major venture capital firms, such as those that gilded Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road. That would provide not just money but a stamp of legitimacy on Tesla.

First he approached Sequoia Capital, which had become king of the valley by being early backers of Atari, Apple, and Google. It was run by Michael Moritz, the wry and literate Welsh-born former journalist who had helped guide Musk and Thiel on the tumultuous ride of PayPal. Musk took him for a drive in a mocked-up Lotus prototype. “It was an absolutely bone-jarring ride with Elon at the wheel in this tiny car with no suspension that went from zero to sixty in less time than it takes to blink,” Moritz says. “How much more terrifying can that be?” After Moritz recovered, he called Musk and said he wasn’t going to invest. “I really admired that ride, but we’re not going to compete against Toyota,” he said. “It’s mission impossible.” Years later Moritz conceded, “I didn’t appreciate the strength of Elon’s determination.”

Instead, Musk turned to VantagePoint Capital, led by Alan Salzman and Jim Marver. It became the lead investor in a $40 million financing round that closed in May 2006. “The duality of the management with Eberhard and Musk concerned me,” Salzman says, “but I realized it was just the nature of this beast.”

The duality was not evident in the press release announcing the funding round, which Musk did not see before it went out. It did not list Musk as one of the company’s founders. “Tesla Motors was founded in June 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning,” it declared. Eberhard was quoted politely thanking Musk for being an investor: “We are proud of Mr. Musk’s continued confidence in Tesla Motors expressed through his strong participation in every round of financing and his leadership on the Board of Directors.”

Musk, who had pushed to remain as spokesman for PayPal even after he had been ousted as CEO, had an enthusiastic but awkward attraction to publicity. He would never become an on-air pitchman for his products, like Lee Iacocca or Richard Branson, nor be a moth attracted to TV interviews. He would occasionally appear at conferences and sit still for magazine profiles, but he felt more comfortable spouting off on Twitter or holding court on a podcast. A master of memes, he had a clever instinct about how to garner free publicity by courting controversy and jousting on social media, though he could brood for years about slights.

One constant was his sensitivity about getting credit. His blood boiled if anyone falsely implied that he had succeeded because of inherited wealth or claimed that he didn’t deserve to be called a founder of one of the companies he helped to start. That is what happened at PayPal and was now happening with Tesla, and both cases would lead to lawsuits.

Eberhard in 2006 had become a bit of a celebrity and enjoyed it. He was described in his frequent television interviews and conference appearances as Tesla’s founder, and that year he appeared in an advertisement for the BlackBerry personal digital assistant (a precursor to the smartphone) which said that he “created the first electric sports car.”

After the press release that May on Tesla’s funding round, which referred only to Eberhard and Tarpenning as the company’s founders, Musk moved forcefully to make sure that his own role was never again minimized. He began conducting interviews without clearing them with the company’s public relations chief, Jessica Switzer, who had been hired by Eberhard. She found it problematic that Musk was making pronouncements about the strategy of the company. “Why is Elon doing these interviews?” she asked Eberhard one day when they were riding in a car. “You’re the CEO.”

“He wants to do them,” Eberhard replied, “and I don’t want to be arguing with him.”

The issue came to a head in July 2006, when Tesla was ready to unveil a prototype of the Roadster. The team had hand-crafted a black one and a red one, each with the ability to go from zero to sixty in about four seconds. They still had not yet changed the skinny seats and ugly dashboard that Musk hated, but otherwise they were pretty close to what Tesla planned to put into production.

An important element in launching a new product, as Steve Jobs had shown with his dramatic announcement events, is creating a buzz that transforms it into an object of desire. This was especially true for an electric car, which needed to overcome the golf-cart image. Switzer came up with plans to hold a celebrity-studded party at the Santa Monica airport where guests would be given a ride in one of the prototypes.

Eberhard and Switzer flew down to Los Angeles to show Musk the plans. “Things went really badly,” she recalls. “He went into every detail, including how much we planned to spend on catering. When I fought back, his whole body jerked away, and he stood up and walked out of the room.” As Eberhard put it, “He shit all over her ideas and then told me to fire her.”

Musk personally took over planning the event. He oversaw the guest list, chose the menu, and even approved the cost and design of the napkins. A smattering of celebrities showed up, including California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was taken on a test drive by Straubel.

Both Eberhard and Musk spoke. “You can have a car that’s quick, and you can have a car that’s electric, but having one that’s both is how you make electric cars popular,” Eberhard said in his confident and polished talk. Musk was awkward, displaying his tendency to repeat words tentatively and stammer slightly. But his lack of slickness charmed the reporters. “Until today, all electric cars sucked,” he declared. Buying the Roadster, he said, would help fund Tesla so that it could make a mass-market vehicle. “Tesla executives are not paid high salaries, and we don’t issue dividends. All free cash flow goes completely into driving the technology to lower costs and make cars that are more affordable.”

The event got glowing coverage. “This is not your father’s electric car,” the Washington Post raved. “The $100,000 vehicle, with its sports car looks, is more Ferrari than Prius—and more about testosterone than granola.”

There was, however, one problem. Eberhard got almost all the credit. “He set out to build a sleek, battery-powered performance machine,” Wired gushed about him in a lavishly illustrated story. “After reading biographies of John DeLorean and Preston Tucker, and reminding himself that launching a car company was a crazy idea, he did just that.” Musk was mentioned as merely one of the investors Eberhard was able to enlist.

Musk sent a sharp email to Tesla’s vice president, who had the misfortune of taking on the publicity portfolio from the fired Switzer. “The way that my role has been portrayed to date, where I am referred to merely as ‘an early investor,’ is outrageous,” he wrote. “That would be like Martin being called an ‘early employee.’ My influence on the car itself runs from the headlights to the styling to the door sill to the trunk, and my strong interest in electric transport predates Tesla by a decade. Martin should certainly be the front and center guy, but the portrayal of my role to date has been incredibly insulting.” He added that he would “like to talk with every major publication within reason.”

The next day, the New York Times wrote a paean to Tesla, headlined “Zero to 60 in 4 Seconds,” that did not even mention Musk. Worse yet, Eberhard was described as Tesla’s chairman, and the only picture was one of him standing with Tarpenning. “I was incredibly insulted and embarrassed by the NY Times article,” Musk wrote to Eberhard and to the public relations firm, PCGC, that they had hired. “I am not merely unmentioned, but Martin is actually referred to as the chairman. If anything like this happens again, please consider the PCGC relationship with Tesla to end immediately.”

In an effort to assert his own central role, Musk published on Tesla’s website

a little essay that outlined the company’s strategy. Cheekily titled “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me),” it declared:

The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy…. Critical to making that happen is an electric car without compromises, which is why the Tesla Roadster is designed to beat a gasoline sports car like a Porsche or Ferrari in a head-to-head showdown…. Some may question whether this actually does any good for the world. Are we really in need of another high-performance sports car? Will it actually make a difference to global carbon emissions? Well, the answers are no and not much. However, that misses the point, unless you understand the secret master plan alluded to above. Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized, and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.

Musk also propelled himself toward celebrity by giving a tour of the SpaceX factory to the actor Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau, who were making the superhero movie Iron Man. Musk became a model for the title character Tony Stark, a celebrity industrialist and engineer who is able to transform himself into an iron man with a mechanized suit of armor he designed. “My mind is not easily blown, but this place and this guy were amazing,” Downey later said. He asked that a Tesla Roadster be put in the movie set depicting Stark’s workshop. Musk later appeared briefly as himself in Iron Man 2.

The prototype of the Roadster unveiled in 2006 accomplished the first step Musk had outlined: shattering the illusion that electric cars were destined to be boxy versions of a golf cart. Governor Schwarzenegger plunked down a $100,000 deposit for one, as did the actor George Clooney. Musk’s neighbor in Los Angeles, Joe Francis, who produced the Girls Gone Wild television series, sent an armored truck with his $100,000 deposit in cash. Steve Jobs, who loved cars, showed a picture of a Roadster to one of his board members, Mickey Drexler, then the CEO of J.Crew. “Creating engineering this good is the beautiful part,” Jobs said.

GM had recently discontinued its own lame version of an electric car, the EV1, and the filmmaker Chris Paine came out with a scathing documentary titled Who Killed the Electric Car? Now Musk and Eberhard and their plucky team at Tesla were poised to revive the future.

One evening, Eberhard was driving his Roadster around Silicon Valley when a kid in a super-pimped Audi pulled up beside him at a stoplight and revved his engine to challenge him to a drag. When the light changed, Eberhard left him in the dust. The same thing happened at the next two lights. Finally the kid rolled

down his window and asked Eberhard what he was driving. “It’s electric,” Eberhard said. “There’s no way you can beat it.”

Musk had planned to launch SpaceX’s rockets from one of the most convenient possible locations: Vandenberg Air Force Base, a 100,000-acre facility on the California coast near Santa Barbara. Rockets and other equipment could easily be driven there from the SpaceX headquarters and factory in Los Angeles, about 160 miles to the south.

The problem was that the base was run by the Air Force, which treated rules and requirements as sacred. This did not sit well with Musk, who was instilling a culture based on questioning every rule and assuming that every requirement was dumb until proven otherwise. “The Air Force and us were such a mismatch,” says Hans Koenigsmann, who was then SpaceX’s chief launch engineer. “They had some requirements that Elon and I laughed about so hard that we would have to catch our breath.” After a moment’s reflection, he adds, “They probably laughed at us the same way.”

Making matters worse, Vandenberg was scheduled to be used to launch a super-secret $1 billion spy satellite. In the spring of 2005, just as SpaceX’s Falcon 1 was getting ready, the Air Force decreed that SpaceX would not be able to use its pad until the satellite was safely launched, and they could offer no timetable when that might happen.

SpaceX had no one covering its expenses. It did not have a cost-plus contract, and it got paid only when it launched or delivered on certain milestones. Lockheed, on the other hand, profited whenever there was a delay. After a conference call with the Air Force bureaucrats in May 2005, during which he realized that SpaceX would not get permission to launch anytime soon, Musk called Tim Buzza and told him to start packing. They were going to move the rocket to another site. Fortunately, they had one available. Unfortunately, it was as inconvenient as Vandenberg was convenient.

Gwynne Shotwell had scored for SpaceX a $6 million deal in 2003 to launch a communications satellite for Malaysia. The problem was the satellite was so heavy that it had to be launched near the equator, where the faster rotation of the Earth’s surface would provide the extra thrust that was needed.

Shotwell invited Koenigsmann into her cubicle at SpaceX, spread out a map of the world, and moved her finger west along the equator. There was nothing to be found until halfway across the Pacific: the Marshall Islands, about forty-eight hundred miles from Los Angeles. It was near the international date line, but nothing else. Once a U.S. territory that was used as an atomic weapon and missile

test site, the Marshall Islands had become an independent republic but remained closely aligned with the U.S., which maintained military bases there. One of them was on a string of tiny coral-and-sand islets known as the Kwajalein Atoll.

Kwajalein Island, known as Kwaj, is the largest speck in the atoll. It’s home to a U.S. Army base with fraying hotel facilities that resemble dormitories and a landing strip that tries to pass for an airport. Three days a week, there was a flight from Honolulu. Factoring in layovers, it took close to twenty hours to get from Los Angeles to Kwaj.

When Shotwell researched Kwaj, she found that the facilities were run by the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama. The person in charge was Major Tim Mango, a name that made Musk laugh. “It’s like something out of Catch-22,” he says. “A person at the Pentagon decides to pick someone named Major Mango to run a tropical island base.”

Musk called Mango out of the blue and explained that he had been a founder of PayPal and had gone into the rocket-launching business. Mango listened for a couple of minutes and hung up on him. “I thought he was nuts,” Mango told Eric Berger of Ars Technica. Mango then did a Google search on Musk, saw a picture of him next to his million-dollar McLaren, read that he had started a company called SpaceX, and realized that he was for real. Scrolling through the SpaceX website, Mango found the company’s phone number and dialed it. The same person with the slight South African accent answered. “Hey, did you just hang up on me?” Musk asked.

Mango agreed to visit Musk in Los Angeles. After they talked for a while in his cubicle, he invited Mango to a nice restaurant for dinner. Mango checked with his government ethics officer, who told him he would have to pick up the tab, so they went to Applebee’s instead. Musk and some of his team reciprocated by flying a month later to Huntsville to meet with Mango and his team. This time they ate better, going to a local roadside joint that featured catfish served fried with the head on. Musk ate one, along with some hush puppies. He wanted to make a deal.

So did Major Mango. His base at Kwaj, like many such installations, was expected to hustle for commercial contracts to cover up to half of their budget. “So Major Mango was rolling out the red carpet for us, while the Air Force was giving us the cold shoulder at Vandenberg,” Musk says. On the flight from Huntsville, Musk told his team, “Let’s go to Kwaj.” A few weeks later, they flew on his jet to the remote atoll, took a tour in an open-door Huey helicopter, and decided to move their launch site there.

Years later, Musk would admit that moving to Kwaj was a mistake. He should have waited for Vandenberg to become available. But that would have required patience, a virtue that he lacked. “I did not realize what a shitshow it would be dealing with the logistics and the salt air,” he says of Kwaj. “Every now and then you shoot yourself in the foot. If you had to pick a path that reduced the probability of success, it would be to launch from an inaccessible tropical island.” Then he laughs. Now that the scars have healed, he realizes that Kwaj was a memorable adventure. As his chief launch engineer Koenigsmann explains, “Those four years on Kwaj forged us, bonded us, and taught us to work as a team.”

A hardy band of SpaceX engineers moved to the barracks on Kwajalein Island. The launch site itself was twenty miles away on an even tinier island in the atoll, known as Omelek. About seven hundred feet wide and uninhabited, it was accessible by a forty-five-minute catamaran ride, a trip that could cause a sunburn even through a T-shirt in the early morning. There the SpaceX team set up a double-wide trailer as an office and poured concrete for a launchpad.

After a few months, some of the crew decided it was easier to sleep on Omelek rather than make the trip across the lagoon each morning and night. They outfitted the trailer with mattresses, a small refrigerator, and a grill on which a jovial goateed SpaceX engineer from Turkey named Bülent Altan perfected a way to cook ground-beef-and-yogurt goulash. The atmosphere was a cross between Gilligan’s Island and Survivor, but with a rocket pad. Each time a newbie stayed overnight, they were awarded a T-shirt imprinted with the mantra “Outsweat, Outdrink, Outlaunch.”

At Musk’s insistence, the crew devised ways to save money. Instead of paving the 150-yard path between the hangar and the launchpad, they rigged up a cradle on wheels to transport the rocket, laid pieces of plywood on the ground, rolled the rocket a few feet, then moved the plywood to smooth the way for rolling the next few feet.

How scrappy and non-Boeing-like were the crew on Kwaj? In early 2006, they planned to conduct a static fire test, one that ignites the engines briefly while the rocket stays attached to the launchpad. But when they began the test, they discovered that not enough electrical power was reaching the second stage. It turned out that the power boxes designed by Altan, the goulash-cooking engineer, had capacitors that could not handle the juiced-up voltage the launch team had decided to use. Altan was horrified because the window the Army had given them for the static test ended four days later. He scrambled to put together a save.

The capacitors were available in an electronics supply house in Minnesota. An intern in Texas was dispatched there. Meanwhile, Altan removed the power

boxes from the rocket on Omelek, jumped on a boat to Kwaj, slept on a concrete slab outside of the airport waiting for the early-morning flight to Honolulu, and made the connection to Los Angeles, where he was picked up by his wife, who drove him to SpaceX headquarters. There he met the intern, who had arrived from Minnesota with the new capacitors. He swapped them into the faulty power boxes and rushed home to change clothes during the two hours it took for the boxes to be tested. Then he and Musk jumped into Musk’s jet for the dash back to Kwaj, taking the intern with them as his reward. Altan hoped to sleep on the plane—he had been awake for most of forty hours—but Musk bombarded him with questions on every detail of the circuitry. A helicopter whisked them from the Kwaj airstrip to Omelek, where Altan put the repaired boxes onto the rocket. They worked. The three-second static fire test was a success, and the first full launch attempt of Falcon 1 was scheduled for a few weeks later.

“Want to go for a bike ride?” Kimbal asked his brother when they woke at 6 a.m. They had flown to Kwaj for the scheduled launch day—March 24, 2006—when Elon hoped that the Falcon 1 rocket he had dreamed up four years earlier would make history.

“No, I need to go to the control center,” Elon replied.

Kimbal pushed back. “The launch isn’t until later. Let’s go for a ride. It will be a stress reliever.”

Elon relented, and they pedaled at their furious pace up a bluff where they could take in the sunrise. There Elon stood silently for a long time, staring into the distance, before heading to the control room. Wearing shorts and a black T-shirt, he paced amid the government-issued wooden desks. When Musk gets stressed, he often retreats into the future. He will surprise his engineers, who are focused on some impending major event, by peppering them with questions about the details of things that are years away: plans for Mars landings, “Robotaxis” without steering wheels, implanted brain chips that can connect to computers. At Tesla, amid the crises facing production of the Roadster, he would start quizzing his team about the status of parts for the next car he envisioned.

Now, on Kwaj, as the countdown for the first launch of the Falcon 1 entered its final hour, Musk was asking his engineers about the components needed for the Falcon 5, the future rocket that would have five Merlin engines. Had they ordered the new type of aluminum alloy for the fuel tanks? he asked a harried Chris Thompson, who was sitting at his console overseeing the countdown. When Thompson, one of SpaceX’s first engineers, said no, Musk got angry. “We were right smack in the middle of a count, and he just wanted to have this deep, aggressive conversation about materials,” Thompson later told Eric Berger. “I was absolutely dumbfounded that he was not even aware that we were trying to launch a rocket, and that I was the launch conductor, and responsible for basically calling out every single command that we’re going to run. It just blew me away.”

Only at the moment of launch did Musk again focus on the present. As the Falcon 1 lifted off the pad, and the engineers in the control room pumped their fists into the air, Musk stared at the video feed from a camera pointed down from the rocket’s second stage. Twenty seconds into the flight, it showed the pristine beach and turquoise water of Omelek in the distance below. “It launched!” Kimbal said. “It really launched!”

Then, after five more seconds, Tom Mueller, who was looking at the data coming in, noticed a problem. “Oh, shit,” he said. “We’re losing thrust.” Koenigsmann saw flames flickering around the outside of the engine. “Oh, shit,” he said, echoing Mueller. “There’s a fire, a leak.”

For a moment, Musk hoped that the rocket would make it up high enough that the dwindling oxygen in the atmosphere would cause the flame to snuff out. Instead, it started to fall. On the video feed, Omelek began to come closer. Then the video went blank. Burning debris fell into the ocean. “My stomach wrenched,” Musk says. An hour later, he and his top team—Mueller, Koenigsmann, Buzza, and Thompson—crammed into an Army helicopter to survey the wreckage.

That night, everyone gathered in the open-air bar on Kwaj and quietly sipped beer. A couple of the engineers cried. Musk brooded silently, his face like a stone and his eyes distant. Then he spoke, very softly. “When we started, we all knew we could fail on the first mission,” he said. “But we will build another rocket and try again.”

Musk and the rest of the SpaceX team were joined by local volunteers the next day as they walked the beach of Omelek and rode in small boats to collect the fragments. “We put the pieces in a hangar and pieced them together as we tried to figure out what went wrong,” Koenigsmann says. Kimbal, a passionate foodie who trained as a chef after Zip2 was sold, tried to cheer everyone up that evening by cooking an outdoor meal that included a stew of meat, canned cannellini beans, and tomato, with a salad of bread, tomatoes, garlic, and anchovies.

As Musk and his top engineers flew on his jet back to Los Angeles, they studied the video. Mueller pointed out the moment when the flame broke out on the Merlin engine. It had clearly been caused by a fuel leak. Musk simmered, then exploded at Mueller: “Do you know how many people told me I should fire you?”

“Why don’t you just fire me?” Mueller shot back.

“I didn’t fucking fire you, did I?” Musk replied. “You’re still fucking here.” Then, to relieve tension, Musk put on the wacky action-film spoof Team America: World Police. As often happened with Musk, darkness gave way to silly humor.

Later that day he posted a statement: “SpaceX is in this for the long haul. Come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.”

Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every

specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong. In the case of the launch failure, it became evident that the leak had come from a small B-nut that secured a fuel line. Musk fingered an engineer named Jeremy Hollman, one of Mueller’s first hires, who, the night before the launch, had removed and then reattached the nut in order to get access to a valve. At a public symposium a few days later, Musk described the mistake by “one of our most experienced technicians,” and insiders knew he was referring to Hollman.

Hollman had stayed behind in Kwaj for two weeks to analyze the debris. On his flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles, he was reading news stories about the failure and was shocked to see that Musk had blamed him. As soon as he landed, he drove the two miles from the airport to SpaceX headquarters and barged into Musk’s cubicle. A shouting match erupted, and both Shotwell and Mueller went over to try to calm things down. Hollman wanted the company to retract Musk’s statement, and Mueller pressed for permission to do so. “I’m the CEO,” Musk replied. “I’m the one that deals with the press, so stay out of it.”

Hollman told Mueller he would stay at the company only if he never had to deal directly with Musk. He left SpaceX a year later. Musk says he doesn’t remember the event, but he adds that Hollman was not a great engineer. Mueller disagrees: “We lost a good guy.”

As it turned out, Hollman was not at fault. When the fuel line was found, part of the B-nut was still attached, but it was corroded and had cracked in half. The sea air of Kwaj was to blame.

After the failure of its first launch, SpaceX became more cautious. The team began testing carefully and recording the details of each of the hundreds of components in the rocket. For once, Musk did not push everyone to move at warp speed and sweep away caution.

Nevertheless, he did not try to eliminate all possible risks. That would make SpaceX rockets as costly and late as those built by the government’s bloated costplus contractors. So he demanded a chart showing every component, the cost of its raw materials, the cost that SpaceX was paying suppliers for it, and the name of the engineer responsible for getting that cost down. At meetings he would sometimes show that he knew these numbers better than the engineers doing the presentation, which was not a pleasant experience. Review meetings could be brutal. But costs came down.

All of this meant taking calculated risks. For example, Musk had been the one who approved the use of cheap and light aluminum for the B-nut that corroded

and doomed the first Falcon 1 flight.

Another example involved what are known as slosh baffles. As a rocket ascends, the fuel remaining in its tanks can slosh around. To prevent this, rigid metal rings can be attached to the inside wall of the tank. The engineers did that in the first stage of the Falcon 1, but adding mass to the upper stage was more of a problem because it had to be thrust all the way into orbit.

Koenigsmann’s team ran a variety of computer simulations to test the risks from sloshing. Only in a tiny percentage of the models did it seem to be a problem. In the list they made of the top fifteen risks, number one was the possibility that the thin material they were using for the rocket shell might bend in flight. Second-stage sloshing was ranked number eleven. When Musk went over the list with Koenigsmann and his engineers, he decided they would accept some of the risks, including slosh. The likelihood of most of these risks could not be determined just by simulations. The risk of slosh would have to be tested in a real flight.

The test came in March 2007. As it had a year earlier, the launch started well. The countdown reached zero, the Merlin engine ignited, and the Falcon 1 lumbered toward space. This time Musk was watching from the control room at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. “Yes, yes! We’ve made it,” Mueller shouted, hugging him. As the second stage made its planned separation, Musk bit his lip, then started to smile.

“Congratulations,” Musk said. “I’m going to watch that video for a long time.”

For five full minutes, enough time to pop open a couple of bottles of champagne, there was jubilation. Then Mueller noticed something on the video. The second stage was beginning to wobble. The data feed confirmed his fears. “I knew right away it was slosh,” he says.

On the video, it looked like the Earth was tumbling in a dryer, but it was actually the second stage spinning. “Catch it, catch it,” an engineer yelled. But by then it was hopeless. At the eleven-minute mark, the feed went blank. The second stage and its payload were crashing back to Earth from 180 miles up. The rocket had reached outer space but had failed to get into orbit. The decision to accept the eleventh item on the risk list—to not incorporate slosh baffles—had come back to bite them. “From now on,” Musk said to Koenigsmann, “we are going to have eleven items on our risk list, never just ten.”

The SWAT Team Tesla, 2006–2008

Antonio Gracias and Tim Watson

Designing a car is easy, Musk often said. The difficult part is manufacturing it. After the prototype of the Roadster was unveiled in July 2006, the hard part began.

The target cost of the Roadster had originally been about $50,000. But then came Musk’s design changes as well as massive problems finding the right transmission system. By November 2006, the cost had swelled to $83,000.

That prompted Musk to do something unusual for a board chair: he flew to England to visit Lotus, the chassis supplier, without telling Martin Eberhard, his CEO. “I find this a rather awkward situation where Elon has asked for Lotus’ own view of the production timing,” one of the Lotus executives wrote Eberhard.

Musk got an earful in England. The Lotus team, which was dealing with rapidly shifting design specifications from Tesla, said that there was no way that they could start producing Roadster bodies until the end of 2007, at least eight months behind schedule. They presented him with a list of more than eight hundred problems that had arisen.

For example, there was a problem with the British company that Tesla had contracted to supply the customized carbon fiber panels, fenders, and doors. It was a Friday, and Musk impulsively decided to visit the supplier. “I hiked through the mud to this building, where I saw that the Lotus guys were right, the body tooling wasn’t working,” he says. “It was a total failure.”

By the end of July 2007, the financial situation had worsened. The cost of materials for the first round of production was estimated to be $110,000 per car, and the company was projected to run out of cash within weeks. That’s when Musk decided to call in a SWAT team.

When Antonio Gracias was twelve years old, he asked for some Apple Computer for Christmas. Not the computer itself; he already had an early Apple II. He wanted the company’s stock. His mother, who ran a small lingerie store in Grand Rapids, Michigan, spoke only Spanish, but she managed to buy him ten shares for $300. He still owns them. They are now worth about $490,000.

Among his first business ventures while a student at Georgetown University was buying condoms in bulk and shipping them to a friend in Russia to sell. That ended up not working well, so he had a huge inventory of condoms in his

dorm room. He put them in matchboxes, sold advertising on the boxes, and distributed them at bars and fraternities.

He got a job at Goldman Sachs in New York, but quit to go to the University of Chicago Law School. Most law students, especially at a place like Chicago, find the work all-consuming, but Gracias was bored. On the side, he started a venture fund that bought small companies. One of them seemed particularly promising: a California firm that did electroplating. But it turned out to be a mess. Gracias found himself commuting to California to try to fix things at the factory, while a friend at law school named David Sacks took notes for him in class. (Remember these names, Antonio Gracias and David Sacks, because they will reemerge in the Twitter saga.)

Because Gracias spoke Spanish like most of the factory workers, he was able to learn from them where the problems were. “I realized that if you invest in a company, you should spend all your time on the shop floor,” he says. When he asked how they could speed things up, one of the workers explained that having smaller vats for the nickel baths would make the plating go faster. Those and other worker-generated ideas succeeded so well that the factory began turning a profit, and Gracias started buying more troubled companies.

He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: “It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?” It was a guiding principle that Musk would make his own.

After law school, David Sacks had gone on to be a cofounder with Musk of PayPal. Gracias was an investor, and he and Musk were among the new millionaires who went to Las Vegas to celebrate Sacks’s thirtieth birthday in May 2002.

Six of the partygoers were in a limousine when one of them, a friend from Stanford, threw up in the back seat. When the driver got them to the hotel, most of the others took off. “Elon and I looked at each other and said, we can’t leave this poor driver with vomit in his car,” Gracias recalls. So they rode with the driver to a 7-Eleven convenience store, bought paper towels and spray cleaner, and cleaned up the car. “Elon has Asperger’s,” Gracias says, “so he sometimes comes across as not emotional, but he actually can care.”

Gracias and his venture capital firm, Valor Management, participated in four of Tesla’s early funding rounds, and in May 2007 he joined the board. That was just when Musk was fathoming the depth of the production problems with the Roadster, and he asked Gracias to figure out what was wrong. For help, Gracias called on an eccentric partner who was a wizard at understanding factories.

After reviving his electroplating company, Gracias bought some similar companies, including one that had a small factory in Switzerland. When he flew there to inspect it, he was picked up at the airport by a ponytailed British robotics engineer named Tim Watkins, who was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans, and a black fanny pack. Whenever he took a new assignment, he would go to a local chain store and buy a ten-pack of T-shirts and jeans, which he would then shed like a molting lizard during his stay.

After a leisurely dinner, Watkins suggested that they go look at the factory. Gracias knew that it did not have a permit to run a night shift, so he was wary when Watkins and the plant manager drove him to a back alley of an industrial park. “I thought for a moment that they might rob me,” Gracias admits. Watkins, with a flair for drama, threw open the back door. The lights were out, and it was pitch black, but there were sounds of high-speed stamping machines working. When Watkins turned on the lights, Gracias realized that they were whirring on their own, with no workers on the premises.

Swiss regulations decreed that workers could be on duty no more than sixteen hours per day. So Watkins had instituted a schedule of two eight-hour shifts separated by four-hour periods when machines would run on their own. He had devised a formula that predicted when every part of the process would need human intervention. “We could get twenty-four hours of production for sixteen hours of labor each day,” he says. Gracias made Watkins a partner in his firm, and they became soul mates, even rooming together, as they developed a shared vision of how to swoop into manufacturing companies and make them more efficient. And that’s what they set out to do for Musk and Tesla in 2007.

The first task was to deal with the problem involving the British supplier of the carbon fiber panels, fenders, and doors. After Musk’s visit to the company, he had some heated exchanges with its managers. A few months later, they called and said they were giving up. They couldn’t deal with his demands, and they were canceling their contract.

As soon as Musk got the news, he called Watkins in Chicago. “I’m getting in my plane. I will pick you up in Chicago, and we’ll go sort this out,” he said. In England, they packed some of the machinery into the plane and flew it to France, where another company, Sotira Composites, had agreed to take on the work. Musk was worried that workers in France were not as dedicated as he was, so he gave them a pep talk. “Please don’t strike or go on vacation right now, or Tesla will die,” he pleaded. After a dinner at a Loire Valley chateau, he left Watkins

behind to teach the French how to work with carbon fiber and make their production lines efficient.

The problem with the body panels prompted Musk to worry about other parts of the supply chain, so he asked Watkins to sort out the entire system. What he found was a nightmare. The process began in Japan, where the cells for the lithium-ion batteries were made. Seventy of these cells were glued together to form bricks, which were then shipped to a makeshift factory in the jungles of Thailand that once made barbecue grills. There they were assembled into a battery pack with a web of tubes as a cooling mechanism. These could not be flown by airplane, so they were shipped by boat to England and driven to the Lotus factory, where they were assembled into the Roadster chassis. The body panels came from the new supplier in France. The bodies with batteries would then be shipped across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to the Tesla assembly facility near Palo Alto. There a team was in charge of the final assembly, including the AC Propulsion motor and drivetrain. By the time the battery cells made their way into a customer’s car, they had traveled around the world.

This presented not just a logistics nightmare but also a cash-flow problem. Each cell at the beginning of the journey cost $1.50. With labor, a full battery pack of nine thousand cells cost $15,000. Tesla had to pay for them up front, but it would be nine months before those packs made it around the world and could be sold in a car to consumers. Other parts going into the long supply process likewise burned cash. Outsourcing may save money, but it can hurt cash flow.

Compounding the problem was that the design of the car, partly because of Musk’s fiddling, had gotten too complex. “It was just a flat-out burning dumpster fire of stupidity,” Musk later admitted. The chassis had become 40 percent heavier and it had to be redesigned to fit the battery pack, which invalidated the crash testing Lotus had done. “In retrospect it would have been much smarter to start with a clean-sheet design and not try to modify the Lotus Elise,” he says. As for the drivetrain, almost none of the AC Propulsion technology turned out to be viable for a production car. “We screwed the pooch six ways to Sunday,” Musk says.

When Watkins got to Tesla’s California headquarters to sort through this mess with Eberhard, he was shocked to discover that there was no bill of materials for the production of the Roadster. In other words, there was no comprehensive record of every part that went into the car and how much Tesla was paying for each. Eberhard explained that he was trying to move to an SAP system to manage such information, but he didn’t have a chief financial officer to organize the transition. “You can’t manufacture a product without a bill of materials,” Watkins told him. “There are tens of thousands of components on a vehicle, and

you are getting pecked to death by ducks.”

When Watkins pieced together the true costs, he realized that things were worse than even the most pessimistic projections. The initial Roadsters off the assembly line would cost, including overhead, at least $140,000, and it would not fall much below $120,000 even after production increased. Even if they sold the car for $100,000, they would be hemorrhaging money.

Watkins and Gracias presented the grim findings to Musk. The cash-sucking supply chain and the cost of the car would bleed the company of all its money— including the deposits that had been made by customers to reserve a Roadster— before it could even begin selling the car at scale. “It was,” Watkins says, “an oh-shit moment.”

Gracias pulled Musk aside later. “This is not going to work,” he said. “Eberhard is not being for real about the numbers.”

Soon after he learned about Musk’s secret trip to England, Eberhard asked him to dinner in Palo Alto. “Let’s start a search to find someone who can replace me,” he said. Later, Musk would be brutal about him, but that evening he was supportive. “Nobody will be able to take from you the importance of what you’ve done by being a founder of this company,” he said. At a board meeting the next day, Eberhard described his plan to step aside, and everyone approved.

The search for a successor went slowly, mainly because Musk was not satisfied with any of the candidates. “Tesla’s sheer number of problems was so high that it was nearly impossible to try to find a decent CEO,” Musk says. “It’s hard to find a buyer for a house that’s on fire.” By July 2007, they had not come close to finding one. That is when Gracias and Watkins came in with their report, and Musk’s mood changed.

Musk called a meeting of the Tesla board for early August 2007. “What’s your best estimate for the cost of the car?” he asked Eberhard. When Musk launches into such a grilling, it’s not likely to end happily. Eberhard had trouble giving a precise answer, and Musk became convinced that he was lying. It’s a word Musk uses a lot, often rather loosely. “He lied to me and said the cost would be no problem,” Musk says.

“That’s slanderous,” Eberhard responds when I quote Musk’s accusations. “I wouldn’t lie to anybody. Why would I do that? The true cost is going to come out eventually.” His voice rises in anger, but there is an undertone of pain and sorrow. He cannot figure out why Musk, after fifteen years, is still so fervent about disparaging him. “This is the richest man in the world beating on somebody who can’t touch him.” His original partner Marc Tarpenning admits that they badly miscalculated the pricing, but he defends Eberhard against Musk’s allegation of lying. “Certainly, it wasn’t deliberate,” he says. “We were dealing with the pricing information that we had. We weren’t lying.”

A few days after the board meeting, Eberhard was on his way to a conference in Los Angeles when his phone rang. It was Musk, who informed him that he was being ousted as CEO immediately. “It was like getting hit by a brick on the side of the head, something I never saw coming,” says Eberhard, who should have seen it coming. Even though he had suggested a search for a new CEO, he did not expect to be unceremoniously ousted before one was found. “They had had a meeting without me to vote me off the island.”

He tried to reach some board members, but none would take his call. “It was unanimous board agreement that Martin had to go, including the members Martin had put on the board,” Musk says. Tarpenning soon left as well.

Eberhard launched a little website called Tesla Founders Blog, where he vented his frustrations about Musk and accused the company of “trying to root out and destroy any of its heart that might still be beating.” Board members asked him to tone it down, which didn’t work, and then Tesla’s lawyer threatened to withdraw his stock options, which did. There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s headspace. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one. But somewhat oddly, Martin Eberhard, who is hardly a household name, is second. “Getting involved with Eberhard was the worst mistake I ever made in my career,” Musk says.

Musk unleashed a barrage of attacks on Eberhard in the summer of 2008, as Tesla’s production woes mounted, and Eberhard responded by suing him for libel. “Musk has set out to re-write history,” the lawsuit began. He still bristles at Musk’s accusations that he lied. “What the fuck?” he says. “The company that Marc and I started turned him into the richest man in the world. Isn’t that enough already?”

They finally reached an uneasy legal settlement in 2009 in which they agreed not to disparage each other and that henceforth both of them would be referred to as cofounders of Tesla, along with JB Straubel, Marc Tarpenning, and Ian Wright. In addition, Eberhard got a Roadster, which he had been promised. They each then issued nice statements about the other that they did not believe.

Despite the no-disparagement clause, Musk would not be able to stop himself from bursting out in anger every few months. In 2019, he tweeted, “Tesla is alive in spite of Eberhard, but he seeks credit constantly & fools give it him.” The following year he declared, “He is literally the worst person I have ever worked with.” Then in late 2021, “Founding story of Tesla as portrayed by Eberhard is patently false. I wish I had never met him.”

Musk should have learned by this point that he was not good at sharing power with a CEO. But he still resisted becoming Tesla’s CEO himself. Sixteen years later, he would be the self-installed chief of five major companies, but in 2007 he thought that he should be like almost every other CEO and stick to one company, in his case SpaceX. So he tapped a Tesla investor, Michael Marks, to be interim CEO.

Marks had been the CEO of Flextronics, an electronics manufacturing services company, which he turned into a highly profitable industry leader by pushing a strategy that Musk liked: vertical integration. His company took end-to-end control of multiple steps in the process.

Musk and Marks got along well at first. Musk, who had the odd habit of

being the world’s wealthiest couch surfer, would stay at Marks’s home when he visited Silicon Valley. “We’d have some wine and shoot the breeze,” Marks said. But then, Marks made the mistake of believing he could steer the company rather than just carry out Musk’s wishes.

The first clash came when Marks concluded that Musk’s devotion to realitydefying schedules meant that supplies were ordered and paid for, even though there was no chance they would be used to build a car anytime soon. “Why are we bringing all these materials in?” Marks asked at one of his first meetings. A manager replied, “Because Elon keeps insisting that we will be shipping cars in January.” The cash flow for these parts was bleeding Tesla’s coffers, so Marks canceled most of the orders.

Marks also pushed back on Musk’s harsh way of dealing with people. A naturally friendly person, Marks was known for his polite and respectful manner toward colleagues, from the janitor to top executives. “Elon is just not a very nice person and didn’t treat people well,” says Marks, who was appalled that Musk had not even read most of his wife Justine’s novels. This wasn’t just a matter of niceties, it was affecting Musk’s ability to know where the problems were. “I told him that people won’t tell him the truth, because he intimidates people,” Marks says. “He could be a bully and brutal.”

Marks still wrestles with whether Musk’s brain wiring—his ingrained personality and what he calls his Asperger’s—can explain or even excuse some of his behavior. Might it even be beneficial in some ways, when it comes to running companies where the mission is more important than individual sensitivities? “He’s somewhere on the spectrum, so I think he honestly doesn’t have any connection with people at all,” Marks says.

Musk counters that being at the other extreme can be debilitating for a leader. Wanting to be everyone’s friend, he told Marks, leads you to care too much about the emotions of the individual in front of you rather than caring about the success of the whole enterprise—an approach that can lead to a far greater number of people being hurt. “Michael Marks would not fire anyone,” Musk says. “I would tell him, Michael, you can’t tell people they have to get their shit together, and then when they don’t get their shit together nothing happens to them.”

A difference in strategy also emerged. Marks decided that Tesla should partner with an experienced automaker to handle the assembly of the Roadster. That flew in the face of Musk’s fundamental instincts. He aspired to build Gigafactories where raw materials would go in one end and cars would come out the other.

During their debates over Marks’s proposal to outsource assembly of the Tesla, Musk became increasingly angry, and he had no natural filter to restrain

his responses. “That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said at a couple of meetings. That was a line that Steve Jobs used often. So did Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Their brutal honesty could be unnerving, even offensive. It could constrict rather than encourage honest dialogue. But it was also effective, at times, in creating what Jobs called a team of A players who didn’t want to be around fuzzy thinkers.

Marks was too accomplished and proud to put up with Musk’s behavior. “He treated me like a child, and I’m not a child,” he says. “I’m older than he is. I had also run a twenty-five-billion-dollar company.” He soon left.

Marks concedes that Musk turned out to be right about the benefits of controlling all aspects of the manufacturing process. In a more conflicted way, he also wrestles with the core question about Musk: whether his bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that made him successful. “I’ve come to put him in the same category as Steve Jobs, which is that some people are just assholes, but they accomplish so much that I just have to sit back and say, ‘That seems to be a package.’ ” Does that, I ask, excuse Musk’s behavior? “Maybe if the price the world pays for this kind of accomplishment is a real asshole doing it, well, it’s probably a price worth paying. That’s how I’ve come to think about it, anyway.” Then, after a pause, he adds, “But I wouldn’t want to be that way.”

When Marks left, Musk recruited a CEO he felt would be tougher: Ze’ev Drori, a combat-tested Israeli paratroop officer who had become a successful entrepreneur in the semiconductor business. “The only person who would actually agree to be CEO of Tesla was someone who was afraid of nothing, because there was a lot to be afraid of,” Musk says. But Drori did not know anything about making cars. After a few months, a delegation of senior executives led by JB Straubel said that they would have trouble continuing to work for him, and Ira Ehrenpreis, a board member, helped convince Musk to take over himself. “I’ve got to have both hands on the steering wheel,” Musk told Drori. “I can’t have two of us driving.” Drori gracefully stepped aside, and Musk became the official CEO of Tesla (and the fourth with that title in about a year) in October 2008.

After the death of their son Nevada, Justine and Elon decided to get pregnant again as soon as possible. They went to an in vitro fertilization clinic, and in 2004 she gave birth to twins, Griffin and Xavier. Two years later, again through IVF, they had triplets: Kai, Saxon, and Damian.

They had begun the marriage living together in a small apartment in Silicon Valley they shared with three roommates and a miniature dachshund who was not housebroken, Justine recalls, and now they were living in a six-thousand-square-foot mansion in the Bel Air hills section of Los Angeles with five quirky boys, a staff of five nannies and housekeepers, and a miniature dachshund who still was not housebroken.

Despite their tumultuous natures, there were times when their relationship was tender. They would walk to Kepler’s Books near Palo Alto, arms around each other’s waists, take their purchases to a café, and read over coffee. “I get choked up talking about it,” Justine says. “There were moments of being just totally content, like totally.”

Musk was awkward socially, but he liked to go to celebrity-studded parties and hang out until dawn. “We went to black-tie fundraisers and got the best tables at elite Hollywood nightclubs, with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio partying next to us,” Justine says. “When Google cofounder Larry Page got married on Richard Branson’s private Caribbean island, we were there, hanging out in a villa with John Cusack and watching Bono pose with swarms of adoring women.”

But through it all, they fought. He was addicted to storm and stress, and she was swept into the turbulence. During their worst arguments, Justine would express how much she hated him, and he would respond by saying such things as “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” Sometimes he would call her “a moron” and “an idiot,” chillingly channeling his father. “When I spent some time with Errol,” Justine says, “I realized that’s where he’d gotten the vocabulary.”

Kimbal, who used to fight physically with his brother, found it difficult to watch him fight verbally with Justine. “Elon fights in a high-intensity way,” Kimbal says. “And Justine could go to the mat as well. You watch it and you’re like, holy moly, this is brutal. I ended up distancing myself from him for years because of Justine. I just could not be around it.”

The entire unsettled lifestyle led to a downward spiral. “It was basically a massive cluster fuck of disruptive things,” says Justine. She felt herself turning into, or being turned into, a “trophy wife,” and, she says, “I sucked at it.” He pushed her to dye her hair blonder. “Go platinum,” he said. But she resisted and began retreating. “I met him when he didn’t have much at all,” she says. “The

accumulation of wealth and fame changed the dynamic.”

As he would do with his colleagues at work, Musk could flip instantly from light to dark to light. He would hurl some insults, pause, then his face would melt into an amused grin, and he would make some oddball jokes. “He’s strong-willed and powerful, like a bear,” Justine told Esquire’s Tom Junod. “He can be playful and funny and romp around with you, but in the end you’re still dealing with a bear.”

When Musk was focused on a work issue, he went into a zone, like he had back in grade school, where he was completely unresponsive. Later, when I recounted to Justine all the calamities at SpaceX and Tesla that were hitting him in 2008, she started to cry. “He didn’t share these things with me,” she says. “I don’t think it occurred to him that maybe it would’ve been very helpful. He was in such a combative relationship with the world. All he had to do was clue me in.”

The main thing she missed in him was empathy. “He’s a great man in a lot of ways,” she says, “but it’s that lack of empathy that always gives me pause.” During a drive one day, she tried to explain to him the concept of true empathy. He kept making it something cerebral, and he explained how, with his Asperger’s, he had taught himself to be more psychologically astute. “No, it has nothing to do with thinking or analysis or reading the other person,” she said. “It involves feeling. You feel the other person.” He conceded that was important in relationships, but he suggested that his brain wiring was an advantage in running a high-performance company. “The strong will and emotional distance that makes him difficult as a husband,” Justine concedes, “may be reasons for his success in running a business.”

Elon would get annoyed when Justine pushed him to try psychotherapy. She had started going to a therapist after Nevada’s death and developed a deep interest in the field. It led her, she says, to the insight that Elon’s rough childhood and his brain wiring allowed him to shut down emotions. Intimacy was hard. “When you’re from a dysfunctional background or have a brain wired like his,” she says, “intensity takes the place of intimacy.”

That’s not exactly right. Especially with his kids, Musk can feel strongly and be emotionally needy. He craves having someone around, even former girlfriends. But it’s true that what he lacks in daily intimacy he makes up for in intensity.

Justine’s dissatisfaction with the marriage deepened her depression and made her angry. “She went from having some highs and lows to just being angry every day,” Elon says. He blamed it on Adderall, a cognitive enhancer that her psychiatrist had prescribed, and he would go around the house throwing away the pills. Justine agrees that she was both depressed and reliant on Adderall. “I

was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, and Adderall was an amazing help for me,” she says. “But it wasn’t the reason I was angry. I was angry because Elon shut me out.”

In the spring of 2008, amid the exploding rockets and turmoil at Tesla, Justine was in a car accident. Afterward, she sat on their bed with her knees pulled up to her chest and tears in her eyes. She told Elon that their relationship had to change. “I didn’t want to be a sideline player in the multimillion-dollar spectacle of my husband’s life,” she says. “I wanted to love and be loved, the way we had before he made all his millions.”

Elon agreed to enter counseling, but after a month and three sessions, the marriage broke up. Justine’s version is that Elon gave her an ultimatum: either she accept the marriage for what it was or he would file for divorce. His version is that she had repeatedly said she wanted to get divorced, and he finally said, “I’m willing to stay married, but you have to promise not to be mean to me all the time.” When Justine made it clear that the current situation was unacceptable to her, he filed for divorce. “I felt numb,” she recalls, “but strangely relieved.”

In July 2008, after breaking up with Justine, Musk was scheduled to give a speech to the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. It was not a propitious time to be talking about rockets. Two of his had blown up, and the third attempt was supposed to launch in three weeks. Tesla’s kludgy production chain was sucking up cash, and the early signs of a global economic meltdown were making new financing difficult. Plus his divorce wranglings with Justine threatened his ability to control his Tesla stock. Nevertheless, he went.

In his speech, he argued that commercial space ventures, such as SpaceX, were more innovative than government programs and were necessary if humans wanted to colonize other planets. He then went to visit the CEO of Aston Martin, who dumped all over the electric car movement and dismissed worries about climate change.

The next day, Musk awoke with stomach pains, which was not unusual. He can pretend to like stress, but his stomach can’t. He was traveling with his friend Bill Lee, a successful entrepreneur, who took him to a clinic. When the doctor determined that he did not have appendicitis or anything worse, Lee insisted that they go let off some steam, and he called a friend, Nick House, who owned the hot nightclub Whisky Mist. “I was trying to snap Elon out of his mood,” Lee says. Musk kept trying to leave, but House convinced them to come to a VIP room in the basement. A few moments later, an actress wearing an eye-catching evening gown walked in.

Talulah Riley, then twenty-two, grew up in a picture-book English village in Hertfordshire and, by the time she met Musk, had distinguished herself in some small but well-played roles, most notably as the tone-deaf middle Bennet sister, Mary, in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Tall and beautiful with long, flowing hair and a sharp mind and personality, she was very much Musk’s type.

Introduced by Nick House and another friend, James Fabricant, she ended up sitting with Musk. “He seemed quite shy and slightly awkward,” she says. “He was talking about rockets, and at first I didn’t realize they were his rockets.” At one point he asked, “May I put my hand on your knee?” She was a bit taken aback, but nodded her assent. At the end, he said to her, “I’m very bad at this, but please may I have your phone number because I would like to see you again.”

Riley had only recently moved out of her parents’ home, and she called the next morning to tell them about the man she had just met. As they were speaking, her father did a Google search. “This man is married and has five children,” he reported. “You’ve been taken in by some playboy.” Furious, she called her friend Fabricant, who calmed her down and assured her that Musk had broken up with his wife.

“We ended up having breakfast together,” Riley says, “and at the end he said, ‘I’d really like to see you for lunch.’ And then after lunch that day, he said, ‘Well, that was really wonderful. Now I’d like to see you for dinner.’ ” Over the next three days, they had almost every meal together and went shopping at Hamleys toy store to get gifts for his five kids. “They were love birds, holding hands the entire time,” Lee says. At the end of the trip, he invited her to fly back to Los Angeles with him. She couldn’t, because she had to go to Sicily for a photo shoot for a Tatler article about a movie she had just made, St. Trinian’s. But from there she flew to Los Angeles.

Rather than moving in with Musk—which she believed was improper—she took a room for a week at the Peninsula Hotel. At the end of the visit, he proposed. “I’m really sorry I don’t have a ring,” he said. She suggested they shake hands on it, which they did. “I remember swimming around with him in the rooftop pool, very giddy, talking about how strange it was that we had known each other for about two weeks and were now engaged.” Riley said she felt sure things would work out. “What’s the worst that could happen to us?” she joked. Musk, suddenly in earnest mode, replied, “One of us could die.” Somehow, in the moment, she found that very romantic.

When her parents flew from London to meet Musk a few weeks later, he asked her father if he could marry her. “I know my daughter very well, and I trust her judgment, so off you go,” he replied. Maye flew to Los Angeles and, for once, approved of one of her son’s partners. “She was an absolute delight, funny and loving and successful,” she says. “And her parents were so nice, a really good English couple.” But on the advice of his brother Kimbal, he decided, and Talulah concurred, that they should wait a couple of years before getting married.

After two failed launches from the remote atoll of Kwajalein, the third attempt of the Falcon 1 rocket would make or break SpaceX, or at least that’s what everyone, including Musk, thought. He told his team he had money for only three tries. “I believed that if we couldn’t do it in three,” he says, “we deserved to die.”

For the second flight, SpaceX had not put a real satellite on top of the rocket because it did not want to lose a valuable payload if it crashed. But for this third attempt, Musk was all in, gambling on success. The rocket would carry an expensive 180-pound Air Force satellite, two smaller satellites from NASA, and the cremated remains of James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty on Star Trek.

The liftoff went beautifully, and the control room in Los Angeles, where Musk was watching, erupted in cheers as the rocket ascended. After two minutes and twenty seconds, the upper stage detached from the booster, as scheduled. The payload seemed to be headed for orbit. “Third time a charm!” one engineer shouted.

Then, once again, there was a gasp from Mueller seated in his usual spot next to Musk. One second after the booster started descending back to Earth, as it was supposed to do, it spurted up briefly and bumped into the second stage. The video feed went blank, and Musk and his team immediately knew that both stages, along with the remains of dear Scotty, were now crashing down.

The problem was that they had redesigned the cooling system for the Merlin engine, and that caused it to have a little bit of thrust even after it shut down. Mueller’s team had tested the new system on the ground, and it worked fine under sea-level conditions. But in the vacuum of space, the tiny spurt of the residual fuel burn nudged the booster up a foot or so.

Musk had run out of money, Tesla was hemorrhaging cash, and SpaceX had crashed three rockets in a row. But he was not ready to give up. Instead, he would go for broke, literally. “SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward,” he announced a few hours after the failure. “There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit. I will never give up, and I mean never.”

In the SpaceX conference room the next day, Musk got on a conference call with Koenigsmann, Buzza, and the launch team on Kwaj. They went over the data and figured out ways to allow more separation time so the bump would not happen again. Musk was in a somber mood. “It was the shittiest period of my life, given what was happening with my marriage, SpaceX, and Tesla,” he says. “I didn’t even have a house. Justine had it.” The team worried that he would, as he

often did, try to single out people to blame. They prepared for a cold eruption.

Instead, he told them that there were components for a fourth rocket in the Los Angeles factory. Build it, he said, and transport it to Kwaj as soon as possible. He gave them a deadline that was barely realistic: launch it in six weeks. “He told us to go for it,” says Koenigsmann, “and it blew me away.”

A jolt of optimism spread through headquarters. “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that,” says Dolly Singh, the human resources director. “Within moments, the energy of the building went from despair and defeat to a massive buzz of determination.”

Carl Hoffman, a Wired reporter who had watched the failure of the second launch with Musk, reached him to ask how he maintained his optimism. “Optimism, pessimism, fuck that,” Musk answered. “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”

On the Brink

Tesla and SpaceX, 2008

In the SpaceX control room

On February 1, 2008, an email went out to employees at Tesla headquarters. “P1 arriving now!” it announced. “P1” was the codename for the first Roadster to make it through the production process. Musk spoke briefly and then took the Roadster on a victory lap around Palo Alto.

This rollout of a few vehicles, which had all been fitted by hand, was only a small triumph. Many car companies, long bankrupt and forgotten, had done similar things. The next challenge was to have a manufacturing process that could churn out the cars profitably. In the past century, only one American car company (Ford) had managed to do that without going through bankruptcy.

At that moment, it was unclear that Tesla would become the second. A subprime mortgage meltdown had begun, which would lead to the most severe global recession since the Great Depression. Tesla’s supply chain was unwieldy, and the company was running out of money. In addition, SpaceX had yet to get a rocket into orbit. “Even though I now had a Roadster,” Musk says, “it was the beginning of the most painful year of my life.”

Musk often skated close to the edge of legality. He kept Tesla afloat through the first half of 2008 by dipping into the deposits made by customers for Roadsters that had not yet been built. Some Tesla executives and board members felt that the deposits should have been kept in escrow rather than tapped for operating expense, but Musk insisted, “We either do this or we die.”

As the situation got more desperate in the fall of 2008, Musk pleaded for money from friends and family to meet Tesla’s payroll. Kimbal had lost most of his money in the recession and, like his brother, was close to bankruptcy. He had been clinging to $375,000 in Apple stock, which he said he needed to cover loans he had taken from his bank. “I need you to put it into Tesla,” Elon said. Kimbal, ever supportive, sold the stock and did as Elon asked. He got an angry call from his banker at Colorado Capital warning that he was destroying his credit. “Sorry, but I have to do it,” Kimbal replied. When the banker called again a few weeks later, Kimbal braced for an argument. But the banker cut him short with the news that Colorado Capital itself had just gone under. “That’s how bad 2008 was,” Kimbal says.

Musk’s friend Bill Lee invested $2 million, Sergey Brin of Google invested $500,000, and even regular Tesla employees wrote checks. Musk borrowed personally to cover his expenses, which included paying $170,000 per month for his own divorce lawyers and (as California law requires of the wealthier spouse) those of Justine. “God bless Jeff Skoll, who gave Elon money to see him through,” Talulah says of Musk’s friend, who was the first president of eBay. Antonio Gracias also stepped up, loaning him $1 million. Even Talulah’s parents offered to help. “I was very upset and called Mommy and Daddy, and they said they would remortgage their house and try to help,” she recalls. That offer Musk

declined. “Your parents shouldn’t lose their house just because I put in everything I had,” he told her.

Talulah watched in horror as, night after night, Musk had mumbling conversations with himself, sometimes flailing his arms and screaming. “I kept thinking he was going to have a heart attack,” she says. “He was having night terrors and just screaming in his sleep and clawing at me. It was horrendous. I was really scared, and he was just desperate.” Sometimes he would go to the bathroom and start vomiting. “It would go to his gut, and he would be screaming and retching,” she says. “I would stand by the toilet and hold his head.”

Musk’s tolerance for stress is high, but 2008 almost pushed him past his limits. “I was working every day, all day and night, in a situation that required me to pull a rabbit out of the hat, now do it again, now do it again,” he says. He gained a lot of weight, and then suddenly lost it all and more. His posture became hunched, and his toes stayed stiff when he walked. But he became energized and hyperfocused. The threat of the hangman’s noose concentrated his mind.

There was one decision that everyone around Musk thought he would have to make. As 2008 careened toward a close, it seemed that he would have to choose between SpaceX and Tesla. If he focused his dwindling resources on one, he could be pretty sure it would survive. If he tried to split his resources, neither might. One day his high-spirited soulmate Mark Juncosa walked into his cubicle at SpaceX. “Dude, why don’t you fucking just give up on one of these two things?” he asked. “If SpaceX speaks to your heart, throw Tesla away.”

“No,” Musk said, “that would be another notch in the signpost of ‘Electric cars don’t work,’ and we’d never get to sustainable energy.” Nor could he abandon SpaceX. “We might then never be a multiplanetary species.”

The more people pressed him to choose, the more he resisted. “For me emotionally, this was like, you got two kids and you’re running out of food,” he says. “You can give half to each kid, in which case they might both die, or give all the food to one kid and increase the chance that at least one kid survives. I couldn’t bring myself to decide that one was going to die, so I decided I had to give my all to save both.”

Musk in the control room and with engineers; Koenigsmann pouring champagne on Kwaj

Musk had budgeted for three launch attempts of the Falcon 1, and all had exploded before they could get to orbit. Facing personal bankruptcy and with Tesla in a financial crisis, it was hard to see how he was going to raise money for a fourth attempt. Then a surprising group came to the rescue: his fellow cofounders of PayPal, who had ejected him from the role of CEO eight years earlier.

Musk had taken his ouster with unusual calm, and he stayed friendly with the coup leaders, including Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. The old PayPal mafia, as they called themselves, were a tight-knit crowd. They helped finance their former colleague David Sacks—the friend who took notes for Antonio Gracias in law school—when he produced the satirical movie Thank You for Smoking. Thiel teamed up with two other PayPal alums, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, to form the Founders Fund, which invested mainly in internet startups.

Thiel was, he says, “categorically skeptical about clean tech,” so the fund had not invested in Tesla. Nosek, who had become close to Musk, suggested that they invest in SpaceX. Thiel agreed to a conference call with Musk to discuss the idea. “At one point I asked Elon whether we could speak to the company’s chief rocket engineer,” Thiel says, “and Elon replied, ‘You’re speaking to him right now.’ ” That did not reassure Thiel, but Nosek pushed hard to make the investment. “I argued that what Elon was trying to do was amazing, and we should be a part of it,” he says.

Eventually Thiel relented and agreed that the fund could put in $20 million. “Part of my thinking was that it would be a way to patch things up from the PayPal saga,” he says. The investment was announced on August 3, 2008, just after the third launch attempt failed. It served as a lifeline that allowed Musk to declare that he was going to fund a fourth launch.

“It was an interesting exercise in karma,” Musk says. “After I got assassinated by the PayPal coup leaders, like Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, I could have said ‘You guys, you suck.’ But I didn’t. If I’d done that, Founders Fund wouldn’t have come through in 2008 and SpaceX would be dead. I’m not into astrology or shit like that. But karma may be real.”

Musk had jolted his team, right after the third failed flight in August 2008, with his deadline of getting a new rocket to Kwaj in six weeks. That seemed like a Musk reality-distortion ploy. It had taken them twelve months between the first

and second failed launches, and another seventeen months between the second and the third. But because the rocket did not need any fundamental design changes to correct the problems that caused the third failure, he calculated that a six-week deadline was doable and would energize his team. Also, given his rapid cash burn, he had no other choice.

SpaceX had components for that fourth rocket in its Los Angeles factory, but shipping it by sea to Kwaj would take four weeks. Tim Buzza, SpaceX’s launch director, told Musk that the only way to meet his deadline would be to charter a C-17 transport plane from the Air Force. “Well, then, just do it,” Musk replied. That’s when Buzza knew that Musk was willing to put all his chips on the table.

Twenty SpaceX employees rode with the rocket in the hold of the C-17, strapped into jump seats along the wall. The mood was festive. The work-crazed crew members were about to pull off, they thought, a hardcore miracle.

As they flew over the Pacific, a young engineer named Trip Harriss pulled out a guitar and started playing. His parents were music professors from Tennessee, and he had trained to become a classical musician. But one Christmas, he was watching Star Trek and decided that he wanted to be a rocket scientist instead. “I ended up figuring out how to change my brain from doing music to doing engineering,” which was not as much of a transition as he thought. After a year at Purdue, he was scrambling for a summer internship, but kept bombing interviews. He had resigned himself to working at a local Ace Hardware when his professor got a call from a friend at SpaceX saying it needed interns. Without waiting for any paperwork, Harriss got into his car the next morning, left his girlfriend behind, and drove from Indiana to Los Angeles.

As they started to descend for refueling in Hawaii, there was a loud popping sound. And another. “We’re like looking at each other, like, this seems weird,” Harriss says. “And then we get another bang, and we saw the side of the rocket tank crumpling like a Coke can.” The rapid descent of the plane caused the pressure in the hold to increase, and the valves of the tank weren’t letting in air fast enough to allow the pressure inside to equalize.

There was a mad scramble as the engineers pulled out their pocket knives and began cutting away the shrink wrapping and trying to open the valves. Bülent Altan ran to the cockpit to try to stop the descent. “Here’s this big Turkish guy screaming at the Air Force pilots, who were the whitest Americans you have ever seen, to go back higher,” Harriss says. Astonishingly, they did not dump the rocket, or Altan, into the ocean. Instead, they agreed to ascend, but warned Altan that they had only thirty minutes of fuel. That meant in ten minutes they would need to start descending again. One of the engineers climbed inside the dark area between the rocket’s first and second stage, found the large pressurization line, and managed to twist it open, allowing air to rush into the

rocket and equalize the pressure as the cargo plane again started to descend. The metal began popping back close to its original shape. But damage had been done. The exterior was dented, and one of the slosh baffles had been dislodged.

They called Musk in Los Angeles to tell him what happened and suggest that they bring the rocket back. “All of us standing there could just hear this pause,” says Harriss. “He is silent for a minute. Then he’s like, ‘No, you’re going to get it to Kwaj and fix it there.’ ” Harriss recalls that when they got to Kwaj their first reaction was, “Man, we’re doomed.” But after a day, the excitement kicked in. “We began telling ourselves, ‘We’re going to make this work.’ ”

Buzza and the chief of rocket structures, Chris Thompson, rustled up the equipment they needed at SpaceX headquarters, including new baffles to prevent slosh in the tanks, and loaded it onto Musk’s jet for the trip from Los Angeles to Kwaj. There they found a hive of engineers scurrying around in the middle of the night working frantically on the stripped rocket, as if they were doctors in an emergency room trying to save a patient.

After SpaceX’s first three failures, Musk had imposed more quality controls and risk-reduction procedures. “So we were now used to moving a little bit slower, with more documentation and checks,” Buzza says. He told Musk that if they followed all these new requirements, it would take five weeks to repair the rocket. If they jettisoned the requirements, they could do it in five days. Musk made the expected decision. “Okay,” he said. “Go as fast as you can.”

Musk’s decision to reverse his orders about quality controls taught Buzza two things: Musk could pivot when situations changed, and he was willing to take more risk that anyone. “This is something that we had to learn, which was that Elon would make a statement, but then time would go on and he would realize, ‘Oh no, actually we can do it this other way,’ ” Buzza says.

As they scrambled in the brutal Kwaj sun, they were watched by an abnormally large coconut crab that was close to three feet long. They named it Elon, and under its gaze, they were able to complete the repairs in the allotted five days. “It was unlike anything that the bloated companies in the aerospace industry could possibly have imagined,” Buzza says. “Sometimes his insane deadlines make sense.”

Unless this fourth launch attempt succeeded, it would be the end of SpaceX and probably of the wacky notion that space pioneering could be led by private entrepreneurs. It might also be the end of Tesla. “We wouldn’t be able to get any new funding for Tesla,” Musk says. “People would be like, ‘Look at that guy whose rocket company failed, he’s a loser.’ ”

The launch was scheduled for September 28, 2008, and Musk planned to watch from the command van at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. To relieve tension, Kimbal suggested that they take their kids to Disneyland that morning. It was a crowded Sunday, and they had not arranged for VIP access, but waiting in the long lines was a blessing because it had a calming effect on Elon. Fittingly, they rode the Space Mountain roller coaster, which was such an obvious metaphor that it would seem trite were it not true.

Dressed in the beige polo shirt and faded jeans he had worn to Disneyland, Musk arrived at the command van just as the launch window was opening at 4 p.m. On one of the monitors, he could see the Falcon 1 on the Kwaj launchpad. There was silence in the control room as a woman’s voice intoned the countdown.

When the rocket cleared the tower, the cheering began, but Musk stared silently at the data streaming onto his computer and at the monitor on the wall showing video from the rocket’s cameras. After sixty seconds, the video showed the plume from the engine darkening. This was fine; it was because the rocket had reached more rarefied air with less oxygen. The islets of Kwajalein Atoll receded, looking like a strand of pearls in the turquoise sea.

After two minutes, it was time for the stages to separate. The booster engine shut down, and this time there was a five-second delay before the second stage was unleashed, to prevent the bumping that had doomed the third launch. When the second stage slowly pulled away, Musk finally allowed himself to let out a whoop of joy.

The Kestrel engine on the second stage performed perfectly. Its nozzle glowed a dull red from the heat, but Musk knew the material could get white-hot and survive. Finally, nine minutes after liftoff, the Kestrel engine cut off as planned and its payload was released into orbit. By now the cheers were deafening, and Musk was pumping his arms into the air. Kimbal, standing next to him, started to cry.

Falcon 1 had made history as the first privately built rocket to launch from the ground and reach orbit. Musk and his small crew of just five hundred employees (Boeing’s comparable division had fifty thousand) had designed the system from the ground up and done all the construction on its own. Little had been outsourced. And the funding had also been private, largely out of Musk’s pocket. SpaceX had contracts to perform missions for NASA and other clients, but they would get paid only if and when they succeeded. There were no subsidies or cost-plus contracts.

“That was frigging awesome,” Musk yelled as he walked onto the factory floor. He did a little jig in front of cheering employees gathered near the canteen. “Fourth time’s a charm!” As the cheers rose again, he began stuttering a bit more

than usual. “My mind is kind of frazzled, so it’s hard for me to say anything,” he murmured. But then he pronounced his vision for the future: “This is just the first step of many. We’re going to get Falcon 9 to orbit next year, get the Dragon spacecraft going, and take over from the Space Shuttle. We’re going to do a lot of things, even getting to Mars.”

Despite his stony appearance, Musk’s stomach had been wrenched during the launch, almost to the point of throwing up. Even after the success, he had trouble feeling joy. “My cortisol levels, my stress hormones, the adrenaline, they were just so high that it was hard for me to feel happy,” he says. “There was a sense of relief, like being spared from death, but no joy. I was way too stressed for that.”

The successful launch saved the future of entrepreneurial space endeavors. “Like Roger Bannister besting the four-minute mile, SpaceX made people recalibrate their sense of limitation when it came to getting to space,” wrote the author Ashlee Vance.

That led to a major change in direction for NASA. The impending end of its Space Shuttle program meant that the U.S. would no longer have any capacity to send crews or cargo to the International Space Station. So the agency announced a competition for a contract to fly cargo missions there. The success of the fourth Falcon 1 flight allowed Musk and Gwynne Shotwell to fly to Houston in late 2008 to meet with NASA and push their case.

When they got off his jet, Musk pulled her aside for a chat on the tarmac. “NASA is worried that I have to split my time between SpaceX and Tesla,” he told her. “I kind of need a partner.” It was not an idea that came easily to him; he was better at commanding than partnering. Then he made her an offer. “Do you want to be president of SpaceX?” He would remain the CEO, and they would divide responsibilities. “I’ll focus on engineering and product development,” he said, “and I want you to focus on customer management, human resources, government affairs, and a lot of the finance.” She accepted right away. “I love working with people, and he loves working with hardware and designs,” she explains.

On December 22, as if to ring down the curtain on the horrible year of 2008, Musk got a call on his cell phone. NASA spaceflight chief Bill Gerstenmaier, who would later end up at SpaceX, gave him the news: SpaceX was going to be awarded a $1.6 billion contract to make twelve round trips to the Space Station. “I love NASA,” Musk responded. “You guys rock.” Then he changed his password for his computer login to “ilovenasa.”

An almost freakish love of risk: Braving a blindfolded knife-thrower at one of his birthday parties

Musk could not savor the NASA contract for more than a few minutes. In fact, his stress level didn’t abate at all. SpaceX may have gotten a Christmas reprieve, but Tesla was still careening toward bankruptcy at the end of 2008. It was due to run out of money on Christmas Eve. Neither the company nor Musk personally had enough in the bank to meet the next payroll.

Musk enlisted his existing investors to fund a new equity round of a mere $20 million. It would be just enough to enable Tesla to sputter forward for a few more months. But when he thought the plan was wrapped up, he discovered that one investor was balking: VantagePoint Capital, led by Alan Salzman. And in order for the new equity to be issued, all of the existing investors had to approve.

Salzman and Musk had spent the past few months disagreeing on strategy. At one point they got into a shouting match at Tesla’s headquarters which could be overheard by employees. Salzman wanted Tesla to become a supplier of battery packs to other car companies, such as Chrysler. “It would help fund Tesla’s growth,” Salzman said. Musk thought that was nuts. “Salzman was trying to insist that we hitch our wagon to a legacy car company,” he says, “and I’m like, that ship is literally sinking.” Salzman was upset that Tesla was burning through the deposits made by Roadster customers, even though the cars had not been built. “People thought they put down a deposit, not an unsecured loan to fund the company. Morally, it was wrong.” Musk was able to get outside counsel to provide an opinion that it was legal. Salzman also was repelled by Musk’s behavior: “He was tough on people and needlessly insensitive. That was just part of his DNA. It didn’t sit well with me.”

On one unofficial board call with Kimbal listening in, Salzman tried to lay the ground for removing Musk as CEO. “I was furious at what these evil fools were trying to do to Elon,” Kimbal says. “I started yelling, ‘No way, no way, you’re not doing this. You guys are fools.’ ” Antonio Gracias was also on the call. “Nope, we’ve got Elon’s back,” he said. Kimbal called his brother, who was able to block a board vote. He was in such a trancelike focus that he didn’t even get angry.

Salzman and his partners insisted that Musk come to their office and detail Tesla’s capital needs going forward. “He was trying to perform open-heart surgery, and we were trying to make sure that he wasn’t putting in the wrong blood type,” Salzman says. “When you have one person with inordinate control, and that person is under a lot of stress, that’s a dicey situation.”

Musk got angry. “We’ve got to do this right away or we’ll miss payroll,” he told Salzman. But Salzman insisted that they meet the following week. He also set the time for 7 a.m., further enraging Musk. “I’m a night owl, I’m like, oh

man, this is fucked,” he says. “Salzman was doing this to me because he is a dickhead.” Musk felt that Salzman relished the chance to look him in the eye and say no, which is what happened.

Musk can be forgiving, as he showed by his reconciliation with his PayPal partners. But there are a few people who cause him to go ballistic, almost irrationally so. Martin Eberhart is one. And Alan Salzman became another. Musk thought he was intentionally trying to push Tesla into bankruptcy. “He is such a douche,” Musk says. “When I say he is a douchebag, that is descriptive, not pejorative.”

Salzman calmly denies Musk’s allegations and seems sanguine about his insults. “We did not have any scheme to take over the company or force it into bankruptcy,” he says. “That’s absurd. Our role is simply to support a company and make sure its capital is spent wisely.” Despite Musk’s personal attacks on him, he actually expresses some admiration. “He has been a singular driving force behind the company, and I’ll give him credit that it worked out. I doff my hat.”

In order to get around Salzman’s veto on a new equity round, Musk scrambled to restructure the financing so that it did not involve issuing more equity but instead taking on more debt. The make-or-break conference call came on Christmas Eve, two days after SpaceX was awarded its NASA contract. Musk was at Kimbal’s house in Boulder, Colorado, along with Talulah Riley. “I was on the floor wrapping presents for the kids, and Elon was on the bed, on the phone, frantically trying to sort this thing out,” she recalls. “Christmas for me is very important, so my priority was to buffer the kids from the situation. I kept saying, ‘It’s Christmas, there’ll be some sort of miracle.’ ”

And there was. VantagePoint ended up supporting the plan, as did the other investors on the call. Musk broke down in tears. “Had it gone the other way, Tesla would have been dead,” he says, “and maybe too the dream of electric cars for many years.” At the time, all of the major U.S. car companies had quit making electric vehicles.

Over the years, one criticism of Tesla has been that the company was “bailed out” or “subsidized” by the government in 2009. In fact, Tesla did not get money from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), commonly known as “the bailout.” Under that program, the government lent $18.4 billion to General Motors and Chrysler as they went through bankruptcy restructuring. Tesla did not apply for any TARP or stimulus package money.

What Tesla did get in June 2009 was $465 million in interest-bearing loans

from a Department of Energy program. The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program lent money to companies to make electric or fuelefficient cars. Ford, Nissan, and Fisker Automotive also got loans.

The Energy Department’s loan to Tesla was not an immediate infusion of cash. Unlike the bailout money to GM and Chrysler, the loan money was tied to actual expenses. “We had to spend money and then submit invoices to the government,” Musk explains. So the first check did not come until early 2010. Three years later, Tesla repaid its loan along with $12 million interest. Nissan repaid in 2017, Fisker went bankrupt, and as of 2023 Ford still owed the money.

A more significant infusion for Tesla came from Daimler. In October 2008, amid Tesla’s crisis and SpaceX’s launch failures, Musk flew to the German company’s Stuttgart headquarters. The Daimler executives told him that they were interested in creating an electric car, and they had a team that was planning to visit the U.S. in January 2009. They invited Tesla to show them a proposal for an electric version of Daimler’s Smart car.

Upon his return, Musk told JB Straubel that they should scramble to put together an electric Smart car prototype by the time the Daimler team arrived. They dispatched an employee to Mexico, where gasoline-powered Smart cars were available, to buy one and drive it to California. Then they put a Roadster electric motor and battery pack in it.

When the Daimler executives arrived at Tesla in January 2009, they seemed annoyed that they had been scheduled to meet with a small and cash-strapped company they had barely heard of. “I remember them being very grumpy and wanting to get out of there as soon as possible,” Musk says. “They were expecting some lame PowerPoint presentation.” Then Musk asked them if they wanted to drive the car. “What do you mean?” one of the Daimler team asked. Musk explained that they had created a working model.

They went to the parking lot, and the Daimler executives took a test drive. The car bolted forward in an instant and reached sixty miles per hour in about four seconds. It blew them away. “That Smart car hauled ass,” Musk says. “You could do wheelies in that car.” As a result, Daimler contracted with Tesla for battery packs and powertrains for Smart cars, an idea not so different from the one Salzman had suggested. Musk asked Daimler also to consider investing in the company. In May 2009, even before the Department of Energy loans were approved, Daimler agreed to take a $50 million equity stake in Tesla. “If Daimler had not invested in Tesla at that time we would have died,” Musk says.

Drew Baglino and Musk with Franz von Holzhausen

The Christmas 2008 financing round, Daimler investment, and government loan allowed Musk to proceed with a project that, if successful, would turn Tesla into a real automotive company that could lead the way into the electric-vehicle era: a mainstream four-door sedan, costing about $60,000, that would be mass-produced. It became known as the Model S.

Musk had spent a lot of time on the Roadster design, but he had a much harder time when he tried to help shape a four-door sedan. “In a sports car, the lines and proportions are like that of a supermodel, and it’s relatively easy to make that good looking,” he says. “But the proportions of a sedan are harder to make pleasing.”

Tesla had originally contracted with Henrik Fisker, a Danish-born designer in Southern California who had produced the sensuous styling of the BMW Z8 and the Aston Martin DB9. Musk was not impressed with his ideas. The car “looks like a fucking egg on wheels,” he said of one of Fisker’s sketches. “Lower the roof.”

Fisker tried to explain the problem to Musk. Because the battery pack would raise the floor of the car, the roof needed to bulge in order to provide enough headroom. Fisker went to a whiteboard and sketched the Aston Martin design that Musk liked. It was low and wide. But the Model S could not have the same sleek proportions because of its battery location. “Imagine you’re at a fashion show with Giorgio Armani,” Fisker explained. “A model who is six feet tall and weighs a hundred pounds comes in wearing a dress. You’re with your wife and she is five feet tall and weighs a hundred fifty pounds, and you say to Armani, ‘Make that dress for my wife.’ It won’t look the same.”

Musk ordered dozens of changes, including to the shape of the headlights and the lines of the hood. Fisker, who considered himself an artist, told Musk why he didn’t want to make some of them. “I don’t care what you want,” Musk replied at one point. “I’m ordering you to do these things.” Fisker recalls Musk’s chaotic intensity with a tone of weary amusement. “I’m not really a Musk type of guy,” he says. “I’m pretty laid back.” After nine months, Musk canceled his contract.

Franz von Holzhausen was born in Connecticut and lived in Southern California but, true to his name, has a Euro-cool aura. He dresses in animal-free Technik-Leather jackets and tight jeans, and he has an ever-present half-smile that hints at both self-confidence and polite humility. After graduating from

design school, he became a journeyman working stints at Volkswagen, GM, and then Mazda in California, where he found himself stuck in what he calls “a rinse-and-repeat cycle” of doing uninspired projects.

One of his passions was go-karting, and a fellow rider, who was working on opening Tesla’s first showroom on Santa Monica Boulevard, gave his name to Musk during the brutal summer of 2008. Having canceled Fisker’s contract, Musk was looking for someone to set up an in-house design studio at Tesla. When Musk called von Holzhausen, he agreed to come by that afternoon. Musk gave him a tour of SpaceX, which blew his mind. “Shit, he’s launching rockets into space,” von Holzhausen marveled. “Cars are easy compared to this.”

They continued the conversation at the opening party that evening for the Santa Monica showroom. In a conference room away from the other partygoers, Musk showed him pictures of the work that Fisker had done on the Model S. “That is really no good,” von Holzhausen declared. “I can make you something great.” Musk started laughing. “Yes, let’s do it,” he said, hiring von Holzhausen on the spot. They would end up becoming a team, like Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, one of the few calming and nondramatic relationships Musk would have, professionally and personally.

Musk wanted the design studio to be near his cubicle at the SpaceX factory in Los Angeles, rather than at Tesla’s office in Silicon Valley, but he did not have the money to build it. So he gave von Holzhausen a corner in the rear of the rocket factory, near where the nose cones were being assembled, and erected a tent to give his team some privacy.

The day after he arrived, von Holzhausen stood next to Gwynne Shotwell near the canteen of the SpaceX factory and watched on the monitors as the company made its August 2008 third launch attempt from Kwaj. That was the launch that failed when the booster, just after separation, lurched slightly and bumped the second stage. It dawned on him that he had left a cushy job at Mazda to work for a manic genius addicted to risk and drama. Both SpaceX and Tesla seemed to be spiraling into bankruptcy. “Armageddon was hitting,” he says, “and there were days when I thought, man, we may not survive to even be able to show this cool car we’re dreaming about.”

Von Holzhausen wanted a sidekick, so he reached out to an auto-industry pal he had known for years, Dave Morris, a clay-modeler and engineer with a jolly fish-and-chips accent from his north London childhood. “Dave, you don’t realize how bootstrap this organization is,” von Holzhausen told him. “This is like a garage band. We may be going bankrupt.” But when von Holzhausen took him through the rocket factory to the design studio area, Morris was hooked. “If he’s this hardcore about rockets and he wants to do cars,” Morris thought, “then I want to do this.”

Musk eventually bought an old aircraft hangar next to the SpaceX factory to house von Holzhausen and his studio. He would drop by to talk almost every day, and he would spend an hour or two every Friday in an intensive design review session. Gradually a new version of the Model S took shape. After a few months of showing sketches and specification sheets, von Holzhausen realized that Musk was most comfortable responding to 3D models. So he and Morris worked with a couple of sculptors to make a full-scale model, which they continually updated. On Friday afternoons, when Musk came for his visits, they would push the model out of the studio and into a sunlit outside parking patio to get his reactions.

In order to keep the Model S from looking bulbous, Musk had to make its battery pack as thin as possible. That is because he wanted it to be underneath the floor of the car, unlike the Roadster, which had a boxy battery pack behind its two seats. Putting the battery low made the car easier to handle and almost impossible to tip over. “We spent a lot of time shaving millimeters from the battery pack so that we could ensure that you had enough headroom without making it a bubble car,” Musk says.

The person he put in charge of the battery was a recent Stanford graduate named Drew Baglino. More personable than the average engineer, with an easy laugh, Baglino would rise to the top ranks of Tesla over the years, but his career almost ended at his first meeting with Musk. “How many battery cells do we need to get to our range target?” Musk asked him. Baglino and the rest of the powertrain team had been analyzing that question for weeks. “We had run dozens of models, looking at how good the aerodynamics could be, how efficient we could get the drivetrain, and how energy dense we could make each of the cells,” he says. And the answer they came up with was that the battery pack would need about 8,400 cells.

“No,” Musk replied. “Do it with 7,200 cells.”

Baglino thought that was impossible, but he caught himself before blurting that out. He had heard the tales of Musk’s anger when challenged. Nevertheless, he found himself several times after that on the receiving end of Musk’s blowtorch. “He was really harsh,” Baglino recalls. “He likes to challenge the messenger, which isn’t always the best approach. He began attacking me.”

Baglino told his boss, Tesla’s cofounder JB Straubel, how shaken he was: “I never want to be in another meeting with Elon.” Straubel, who had been through many such sessions, surprised him by declaring it had been a “great” meeting. “That’s the kind of feedback we need,” Straubel said. “You just have to

learn how to deal with his demands. Figure out what his goal is, and keep giving him information. That’s how he gets the best outcomes.”

In the case of the battery cells, Baglino ended up being surprised. “The crazy thing about his 7,200 target was we indeed ended up with 7,200 cells,” he says. “It was a gut calculus, but he nailed it.”

Once he got the cell number reduced, Musk focused on how low the battery pack could be positioned. Putting it in the floor pan meant that it needed to be protected from being pierced by rocks or debris. That led to many showdowns with the more cautious members of his team, who wanted a thick plate under the battery. Sometimes the meetings erupted into shouting matches. “Elon would get personal and the engineers would freak out,” Straubel says. “They’d feel that they were being asked to do something unsafe.” When they dug in their heels, it was like waving a red cape in front of a bull. “Elon is a hypercompetitive guy, and challenging him means that a meeting can go to hell.”

To be the chief engineer for the Model S, Musk hired Peter Rawlinson, a genteel Englishman who had worked on car bodies for Lotus and Land Rover. Together they came up with a way to do more than merely place the battery pack under the floor of the car. They engineered it so that the pack became an element of the car’s structure.

It was an example of Musk’s policy that the designers sketching the shape of the car should work hand in glove with the engineers who were determining how the car would be built. “At other places I worked,” von Holzhausen says, “there was this throw-it-over-the-fence mentality, where a designer would have an idea and then send it to an engineer, who sat in a different building or in a different country.” Musk put the engineers and designers in the same room. “The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers,” von Holzhausen says.

This followed the principle that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had instilled at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”

There was another principle that came out of Apple’s design studio. When Jony Ive conceived the candy-colored, friendly iMac in 1998, he included a recessed

handle. It was not very functional, because the iMac was a desktop computer that was not meant to be carried around. But it sent a signal of friendliness. “If there’s this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible,” Ive explained. “It’s approachable. It gives you permission to touch.”

Likewise, von Holzhausen sketched a way to do door handles that were flush to the car and popped out and lit up like a happy handshake when the driver approached with a key. It did not add any great functionality. A regular extruding door handle would work just as well. But Musk immediately embraced the idea. It would send a chirpy signal of friendliness. “The handle senses your approach, lights up, pops out to greet you, and it’s magical,” he says.

The engineers and production teams fought the idea. There was little space inside the door for the mechanisms, which would have to work thousands of times in various weather conditions. One of the engineers flung back at Musk one of his favorite words: “stupid.” But Musk persisted. “Stop fighting me on this,” he ordered. It ended up being a signature feature of the cars, one that sealed an emotional bond with the owner.

Musk had a resistance to regulations. He did not like to play by other people’s rules. As the Model S neared completion, he got in the car one day and pulled down the passenger-side visor. “What the fuck is this?” he asked, pointing to the government-mandated warning label about air bags and how to disable them when a child is in the passenger seat. Dave Morris explained that the government required them. “Get rid of them,” Musk ordered. “People aren’t stupid. These stickers are stupid.”

In order to get around the requirements, Tesla designed a system to suppress airbag deployments when it detected that a child was in the passenger seat. But that did not satisfy the government, and Musk didn’t back down. Over the years, Tesla would engage in a back-and-forth with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sporadically issued recall notices for Tesla cars without the warning sticker.

Musk wanted the Model S to have a large touchscreen at the driver’s fingertips. He and von Holzhausen spent hours kicking around ideas for the size, shape, and positioning of the screen. It turned out to be a game-changer for the auto industry. It gave the driver easier control over the lights, temperature, seat positions, suspension levels, and almost everything in the car except opening the glove compartment (which, for some reason, government regulations required have a physical button). It also allowed more fun, including video games, fart sounds for the passenger seat, different horn sounds, and Easter egg jokes hidden in the interfaces.

Most importantly, regarding the car as a piece of software rather than just hardware allowed it to be continuously upgraded. New features could be

delivered over the air. “We were amazed at how we could add tons of functionality over the years, including more acceleration,” Musk says. “It allowed the car to get better than when you originally bought it.”

When SpaceX won the NASA contract to send cargo to the International Space Station, it came with a challenge. It would require a rocket that was much more powerful than the Falcon 1.

Musk initially planned that this next rocket would have five engines rather than one, and thus be called the Falcon 5. It would also need a more powerful engine. But Tom Mueller worried that it would take too long to build a new engine, and he persuaded Musk to accept a revised idea: a rocket with nine of the original Merlin engines. Thus was born the Falcon 9, a rocket that would become the workhorse of SpaceX for more than a decade. At 157 feet, it was more than twice as tall as the Falcon 1, ten times more powerful, and twelve times heavier.

In addition to the new rocket, they needed a space capsule, the module that is launched atop the rocket and carries a payload of cargo (or astronauts) into orbit and can dock with the Space Station and return back to Earth. Musk worked with his engineers in a series of Saturday-morning meetings to design one from scratch, which he dubbed Dragon, after Puff the Magic Dragon.

And finally, they needed a place—not Kwaj!—where they could regularly launch the new rocket. It would be too hard to ship the big Falcon 9 halfway across the Pacific. Instead, SpaceX made a deal to use part of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, which has close to seven hundred buildings, pads, and launch complexes spread out over 144,000 acres on Florida’s Atlantic coast. SpaceX leased Launchpad 40, which since the 1960s had been used for the Air Force’s Titan rocket launches.

To rebuild the complex, Musk hired an engineer named Brian Mosdell, who worked for the Lockheed-Boeing joint venture United Launch Alliance. Musk’s job interviews can be disconcerting. He multitasks, stares blankly, and sometimes pauses silently for a full minute or more. (Applicants are warned in advance to just sit there and not try to fill the silence.) But when he is engaged and wants to truly get a bead on an applicant, he dives into detailed technical discussions. What were the scientific reasons to use helium rather than nitrogen? What were the best methods to do pump shaft seals and labyrinth purges? “I have a good neural net when it comes to assessing with just a few questions a person’s ability to perform,” Musk says. Mosdell got the job.

Regularly prodded by Musk, Mosdell rebuilt the area in SpaceX’s typical scrappy way, literally. He and his boss, Tim Buzza, scavenged for components that could be cheaply repurposed. Buzza was driving down a road at Cape Canaveral and saw an old liquid oxygen tank. “I asked the general if we could

buy it,” he says, “and we got a $1.5 million pressure vessel for scrap. It’s still at

Pad 40.”

Musk also saved money by questioning requirements. When he asked his team why it would cost $2 million to build a pair of cranes to lift the Falcon 9, he was shown all the safety regulations imposed by the Air Force. Most were obsolete, and Mosdell was able to convince the military to revise them. The cranes ended up costing $300,000.

Decades of cost-plus contracts had made aerospace flabby. A valve in a rocket would cost thirty times more than a similar valve in a car, so Musk constantly pressed his team to source components from non-aerospace companies. The latches used by NASA in the Space Station cost $1,500 each. A SpaceX engineer was able to modify a latch used in a bathroom stall and create a locking mechanism that cost $30. When an engineer came to Musk’s cubicle and told him that the air-cooling system for the payload bay of the Falcon 9 would cost more than $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell in her adjacent cubicle to ask what an air-conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commercial air-conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket.

When Mosdell worked for Lockheed and Boeing, he rebuilt a launchpad complex at the Cape for the Delta IV rocket. The similar one he built for the Falcon 9 cost one-tenth as much. SpaceX was not only privatizing space; it was upending its cost structure.

“I’ve been told we should extend the Space Shuttle program. Is that right?” Barack Obama asked his campaign advisor on space issues, Lori Garver, in early September 2008.

“No,” she answered. “The private sector should do this.” It was a risky piece of advice. SpaceX had failed three times to launch a satellite into orbit and was just about to make what might be its final attempt.

Garver, a NASA veteran, was trying to convince the Democratic nominee for president that America’s approach to rocket-building needed to change. NASA was planning to ground the Space Shuttle and hoped to replace it with a new rocket program it called Constellation. It was being run in the traditional way: NASA awarded cost-plus contracts to the Lockheed-Boeing United Launch Alliance to build most of the components. But the projected cost of the program had more than doubled, and it was nowhere near completion. Garver recommended that Obama scuttle it and instead allow private companies, such as SpaceX, to develop rockets that could take astronauts into space.

That is why she, like Musk, had a lot riding on the fourth launch attempt of the Falcon 1 from Kwaj that September. When it was a success, she received congratulatory calls from Obama’s top staffers, and Obama ended up appointing her the deputy administrator of NASA.

Unfortunately for Garver, Obama chose as her boss Charlie Bolden, a former Marine Corps pilot and NASA astronaut, who did not share her enthusiasm for partnering with the commercial sector. “I was not an ideologue like many around me who felt that all we need to do is take NASA’s budget, take everything for human spaceflight, and give it to Elon Musk and SpaceX,” Bolden says.

Garver also had to fight those in Congress who had Boeing facilities in their states and, despite being Republicans, were opposed to private enterprise taking over what they felt should be run by a government bureaucracy. “Senior industry and government officials took pleasure deriding SpaceX and Elon,” Garver says. “It didn’t help that Elon was younger and richer than they were, with a Silicon Valley disrupter mentality and lack of deference toward the traditional industry.”

Garver won the argument at the end of 2009. Obama canceled NASA’s Constellation program after his science advisor and budget director said that it was “over budget, behind schedule, off course, and unexecutable.” NASA traditionalists, including the revered astronaut Neil Armstrong, denounced the decision. “The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” said Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who had traveled with Musk to Russia seven years earlier, charged, “Essentially the U.S. has decided that they’re not going to be a significant player in human space flight.” They were wrong. Over the next decade, relying mainly on SpaceX, the U.S. would send more astronauts, satellites, and cargo to space than any other country.

Obama decided to travel to Cape Canaveral in April 2010 to make the case that relying on private companies such as SpaceX did not mean that the U.S. was abandoning space exploration. “Some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way,” he said in his speech. “I disagree. By buying the services of space transportation—rather than the vehicles themselves—we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met. But we will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies—from young startups to established leaders—compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.”

The president’s team had decided that he would go to one of the launchpads after the speech and have a photo op in front of a rocket. The way the story was reported, the president planned to go to a pad used by the United Launch

Alliance, but it was preparing to launch a secret intelligence satellite, so that idea was nixed. Lori Garver says that wasn’t the true story: “All of us at the White House were in agreement that we wanted to go to the SpaceX pad.”

The televised image was priceless for both Obama and Musk: the young president, who was born the year that John Kennedy pledged America would send a man to the moon, walking alongside the risk-taking entrepreneur, chatting casually as they circled the gleaming Falcon 9. Musk liked Obama. “I thought he was a moderate but also someone willing to force change,” he says. He got the impression that Obama was trying to size him up. “I think he wanted to get a sense if I was dependable or a little nuts.”

Marc Juncosa, center, leading a toast to the Falcon 9 liftoff

Musk’s chance to prove that he was not “a little nuts,” or at least that he was also dependable, came two months later, in June 2010, when Falcon 9 attempted its first unmanned test voyage into orbit. The Falcon 1 had failed three times before being successful, and this rocket was far bigger and more complex. Musk thought it was unlikely to succeed on its first try, but there was a lot of pressure now that the president had made it America’s policy to depend on such commercial launches. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, “A dramatic launch failure could further undercut an already faltering campaign by the White House to persuade Congress to spend billions to help SpaceX and perhaps two other rivals to develop commercial replacements for NASA’s retiring Space Shuttle fleet.”

The chances for success were not helped when a storm rolled in and soaked the rocket. “Our antenna got wet,” Buzza recalls, “and we weren’t getting a good telemetry signal.” They lowered the rocket from the launchpad, and Musk came out with Buzza to inspect the damage. Bülent Altan, the goulash-cooking hero of Kwaj, climbed a ladder, looked at the antennas, and confirmed that they were too wet to work. A typical SpaceX fix was improvised: they fetched a hair dryer, and Altan waved it over the antennas until the moisture was gone. “You think it is good enough to fly tomorrow?” Musk asked him. Altan replied, “It should do the trick.” Musk stared at him silently for a while, assessing him and his answer, then said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

The next morning, the radio frequency checks were still not perfect. “It wasn’t the right sort of pattern,” Buzza says. So he told Musk there might be another delay. Musk looked at the data. As usual, he was willing to tolerate more risk than others. “It’s good enough,” he said. “Let’s launch.” Buzza assented. “The important thing with Elon,” he says, “is that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders to his.”

The launch went perfectly. Musk, who joined his jubilant team at an all-night party on Cocoa Beach pier, called it “a vindication of what the president has proposed.” It was also a vindication of SpaceX. Less than eight years from its founding, and two years from facing bankruptcy, it was now the most successful private rocket company in the world.

The next big test, scheduled for later in 2010, was to show that SpaceX could not

only launch an unmanned capsule into orbit but also return it to Earth safely. No private company had done that. In fact, only three governments had: the United States, Russia, and China.

Once again, Musk showed a willingness, bordering on the reckless, to take the risks that separated his programs from those run by NASA. The day before the planned December launch, a final pad inspection revealed two small cracks in the engine skirt of the rocket’s second stage. “Everyone at NASA assumed we’d be standing down from the launch for a few weeks,” says Garver. “The usual plan would have been to replace the entire engine.”

“What if we just cut the skirt?” Musk asked his team. “Like, literally cut around it?” In other words, why not just trim off a tiny bit of the bottom that had the two cracks? The shorter skirt would mean the engine would have slightly less thrust, one engineer warned, but Musk calculated that there would still be enough to do the mission. It took less than an hour to make the decision. Using a big pair of shears, the skirt was trimmed, and the rocket launched on its critical mission the next day, as planned. “NASA couldn’t do anything but accept SpaceX’s decisions and watch in disbelief,” Garver recalls.

The rocket was able, as Musk predicted, to lift the Dragon capsule into orbit. It then performed its assigned maneuvers and fired its braking rockets so that it would return to Earth, parachuting gently down to the water just off the coast of California.

As awesome as it was, Musk had a sobering realization. The Mercury program had accomplished similar feats fifty years earlier, before either he or Obama had been born. America was just catching up with its older self.

SpaceX repeatedly proved that it could be nimbler than NASA. One example came during a mission to the Space Station in March 2013, when one of the valves in the engine of the Dragon capsule stuck shut. The SpaceX team started scrambling to figure out how to abort the mission and return the capsule safely before it crashed. Then they came up with a risky idea. Perhaps they could build up the pressure in front of the valve to a very high level. Then if they suddenly released the pressure, it might cause the valve to burp open. “It’s like the spacecraft equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver,” Musk later told the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport.

The top two NASA officials in the control room stood back and watched as the young SpaceX engineers hatched the plan. One of SpaceX’s software engineers churned out the code that would instruct the capsule to build up pressure, and they transmitted it as if it were a software update for a Tesla car.

Boom, pop. It worked. The valve burped open. Dragon docked with the

Space Station and then returned home safely.

That paved the way for SpaceX’s next great challenge, one even grander and riskier. Prodded by Garver, the Obama administration decided that, once the Space Shuttle was retired, the U.S. would rely on private companies, most notably SpaceX, to launch not only cargo but humans into orbit. Musk was prepared for that. He had already told the SpaceX engineers to build into the Dragon capsule an element that was not necessary for the transport of cargo: a window.

Musk had proposed to Talulah Riley weeks after they met in the summer of 2008, but they both agreed they should wait about two years before they actually got married.

Musk’s emotional settings range from callous to needy to exuberant, the last one most evident when he falls in love. Riley went back to England in July 2009 to star in St. Trinian’s 2, a sequel to the girls’-boarding-school comedy she had done two years earlier, and on her first day of filming, at a manor house near her childhood home north of London, she received five hundred roses from Musk. “When he’s angry, he’s angry, and when he’s joyful, he’s joyful, and he’s almost childlike in his enthusiasms,” she says. “He can be very cold, but he feels things in a very pure way, with a depth that most people don’t get.”

What struck Riley most was what she calls “the child within the man.” When he’s happy, this childlike inner self can manifest in a manic way. “When we went to the cinema, he would get so caught up with a silly movie that he would stare in rapture at the screen with his mouth slightly open laughing, then he would actually end up on the floor rolling around, holding his belly.”

But she also noticed that the child within the man could be expressed in a darker way. Early on in their relationship, he would stay up late at night and tell Riley about his father. “I remember one of those nights, he began crying, and it was really horrendous for him,” she says.

During those conversations, Musk would sometimes lapse into a trancelike state and recount things that his father used to say. “He was almost not conscious, not in the room with me, when he told me these things,” she recalls. Hearing the phrases that Errol had used in berating Elon shocked her, not only because they were brutal but because she had heard Elon use some of the same phrases when he was angry.

A quiet and polite girl from the bucolic English countryside, she knew that marriage to Musk would be challenging. He was thrilling and mesmerizing, but also brooding and encrusted with layers of complexity. “Being with me can be difficult,” he told her. “This will be a hard path.”

She decided to go along for the ride. “Okay,” she told him one day. “I can take a hard path.”

They wed in September 2010 at Dornoch Cathedral, a thirteenth-century church in the Scottish Highlands. “I’m Christian, and Elon is not, but he very kindly agreed to get married in a cathedral,” Riley says. She wore a “full-on princess dress from Vera Wang,” and she gave Musk a top hat and cane so he

could dance around like Fred Astaire, whose movies she had turned him on to. His five boys, dressed in tailor-made tuxedos, were supposed to share the duties of ring bearer and attendants, but Saxon, his autistic son, bowed out, the other boys began fighting, and only Griffin actually made it to the end of the aisle. But the drama added to the fun, Riley recalled.

The party afterward was at nearby Skibo Castle, also built in the thirteenth century. When Riley asked Musk what he wanted, he replied, “There shall be hovercraft and eels.” It was a reference to a Monty Python skit in which John Cleese plays a Hungarian who tries to speak English using a flawed phrasebook and tells a shopkeeper, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (It’s actually funnier than I’ve made it sound.) “It was quite difficult,” Riley says, “because you need permits to transport eels between England and Scotland, but in the end we did have an amphibious little hovercraft and eels.” There was also an armed personnel carrier that Musk and his friends used to crush three junked cars. “We all got to be young boys again,” Navaid Farooq says.

Riley liked to throw creative parties, and Musk, despite being socially awkward (or perhaps because of it), had an odd enthusiasm for them. They allowed him to let loose, especially during times of tension, which, for him, were most of the time. “So I used to throw very theatrical parties just to keep him entertained,” she says.

The most lavish was for his fortieth birthday in June 2011, less than a year after their wedding. Along with three dozen friends, he and Talulah rented cars on the Orient Express train from Paris to Venice.

They met at the Hotel Costes, an opulent establishment near the Place Vendôme. A few of them, led by Elon and Kimbal, went to a fine restaurant, and as they were heading back to the hotel they decided on a lark to rent some bicycles and dash around the town. They biked until 2 a.m., then bribed the hotel to keep the bar open for them. After an hour of drinking, they got back on the bikes and ended up at an underground lounge called Le Magnifique, where they stayed until 5 a.m.

They didn’t get up until 3 p.m. the next day, just in time to catch the train. Dressed in tuxedos, they had a formal dinner on the Orient Express, with caviar and champagne, followed by their own private entertainment by the Lucent Dossier Experience, a steampunky performance troupe featuring avant-garde music, aerial arts, and fire, somewhat like Cirque du Soleil, but more erotic. “People were hanging from the ceiling,” Kimbal says, “which was a bizarre scene in the very traditional Orient Express train car.” Riley would sometimes privately

sing to Elon a song called “My Name Is Tallulah” from the movie Bugsy Malone. He said his one wish for his birthday was that she would perform it for the whole party. “I don’t really sing, so it was traumatic for me, but I did it for him,” she says.

Musk did not have many stable and grounded relationships, nor did he have many stable and grounded periods in his life. No doubt those two things were related. Among his few such relationships was the one he had with Riley, and the years he would spend with her—from their meeting in 2008 to their second divorce in 2016—would end up being the longest stretch of relative stability in his life. If he had liked stability more than storm and drama, she would have been perfect for him.

With Griffin, Talulah, and Xavier celebrating ringing the NASDAQ opening bell, June 2010

With Marques Brownlee at the Tesla Fremont factory

Beginning with the theology of globalization in the 1980s, and relentlessly driven by cost-cutting CEOs and their activist investors, American companies shut down domestic factories and offshored manufacturing. The trend accelerated in the early 2000s, when Tesla was getting started. Between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs. By sending their factories abroad, American companies saved labor costs, but they lost the daily feel for ways to improve their products.

Musk bucked this trend, largely because he wanted to have tight control of the manufacturing process. He believed that designing the factory to build a car —“the machine that builds the machine”—was as important as designing the car itself. Tesla’s design-manufacturing feedback loop gave it a competitive advantage, allowing it to innovate on a daily basis.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison joined only two corporate boards, Apple and Tesla, and he became close friends with Jobs and Musk. He said they both had beneficial cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did,” he says. What set them apart is that Musk, unlike Jobs, applied that obsession not just to the design of a product but also to the underlying science, engineering, and manufacturing. “Steve just had to get the conception and software right, but the manufacturing was outsourced,” Ellison says. “Elon took on the manufacturing, the materials, the huge factories.” Jobs loved to walk through Apple’s design studio on a daily basis, but he never visited his factories in China. Musk, in contrast, spent more time walking assembly lines than he did walking around the design studio. “The brain strain of designing the car is tiny compared to the brain strain of designing the factory,” he says.

Musk’s approach came together in May 2010, when Toyota was looking to sell a factory that it had once shared with GM in Fremont, California, on the fringe of Silicon Valley, a half-hour drive from Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto. Musk invited Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, to his Los Angeles home and drove him around in a Roadster. He was able to get the mothballed factory, which at one point had been worth $1 billion, for $42 million. In addition, Toyota agreed to invest $50 million in Tesla.

When redesigning the factory, Musk put the cubicles for the engineers right on the edge of the assembly lines, so they would see the flashing lights and hear the complaints whenever one of their design elements caused a slowdown. Musk often corralled the engineers to walk up and down the lines with him. His own open desk was in the middle of it all, with no walls around him, and it had a

pillow underneath so he could spend the night when he wanted.

The month after Tesla bought the factory, Musk was able to take the company public, the first IPO by an American carmaker since Ford’s in 1956. He traveled with Talulah and two of his sons to ring the opening bell at the NASDAQ stock exchange on Times Square. By the end of the day, the stock market had fallen, but Tesla’s stock rose more than 40 percent, providing $266 million in financing for the company. That evening, Musk flew west to the Fremont factory, where he made a pithy toast. “Fuck oil,” he said. Tesla was almost dead at the end of 2008. Now, just eighteen months later, it had become America’s hottest new company.

When the first Model S cars rolled off the Fremont assembly line in June 2012, hundreds of people, including California governor Jerry Brown, showed up for the celebration. Many of the workers waved American flags. Some cried. What had once been a bankrupt factory that had laid off all its workers now had two thousand employees and was leading the way to an electric-vehicle future.

But a few days later, when Musk was delivered his own Model S from the production line, he was not happy. More precisely, he declared that it sucked. He asked von Holzhausen to come to his house, and they spent two hours going over the vehicle. “Jesus Christ, is this the best we can do?” Musk asked. “The panel gap finish is crap. The paint quality is crap. Why aren’t we getting the same production quality as Mercedes and BMW?”

When Musk gets angry, he is quick to pull the trigger. He fired three production quality chiefs in quick succession. One day that August, von Holzhausen was with him on his plane and asked how he could help. He should have been careful about making such an offer. Musk asked him to move to Fremont for a year to be the new production quality chief.

Von Holzhausen and his deputy Dave Morris, who accompanied him to Fremont, would sometimes walk the factory’s assembly lines until two in the morning. It was an interesting experience for a designer. “It taught me how all the things you create on the drawing board have an effect at the other end, on the assembly line,” von Holzhausen says. Musk joined them two or three nights a week. His focus was on root causes. What in the design was to blame for a production-line problem?

One of Musk’s favorite words—and concepts—was “hardcore.” He used it to describe the workplace culture he wanted when he founded Zip2, and he would use it almost thirty years later when he upended the nurturing culture at Twitter. As the Model S production line ramped up, he spelled out his creed in a

quintessential email to employees, titled “Ultra hardcore.” It read, “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”

The validation came at the end of 2012, when Motor Trend Magazine picked its car of the year. The headline: “Tesla Model S, Shocking Winner: Proof Positive That America Can Still Make (Great) Things.” The review itself was so breathtaking that it surprised even Musk. “It drives like a sports car, eager and agile and instantly responsive. But it’s also as smoothly effortless as a Rolls-Royce, can carry almost as much stuff as a Chevy Equinox, and is more efficient than a Toyota Prius. Oh, and it’ll sashay up to the valet at a luxury hotel like a supermodel working a Paris catwalk.” The article ended by mentioning “the astonishing inflection point the Model S represents”: it was the first time that the award had gone to an electric vehicle.

The idea that Musk proposed in 2013 was audacious: build a gigantic battery factory in the U.S., with an output greater than all other battery factories in the world combined. “It was a completely wacky idea,” says JB Straubel, the battery wiz who was one of Tesla’s cofounders. “It seemed like science fiction crazy.”

To Musk, it was a matter of first principles. The Model S was using about 10 percent of the world’s batteries. The new models that Tesla had on the drawing board—an SUV called the Model X and a mass-market sedan that would become the Model 3—would require ten times the number of batteries. “What began as a showstopper problem,” Straubel says, “became a really fun blue-sky wacky brainstorming opportunity to say, ‘Wow, this is actually a chance to do something unique.’ ”

There was one problem, Straubel recalls. “We had no clue how to build a battery factory.”

So Musk and Straubel decided to pursue a partnership with their battery supplier, Panasonic. Together they would build a facility where Panasonic would make the battery cells and then Tesla would turn them into battery packs for cars. The 10-million-square-foot factory would cost $5 billion, and Panasonic would finance $2 billion of it. But Panasonic’s top leaders were hesitant. They had never had that type of partnership, and Musk (understandably) did not strike them as an easy guy to dance with.

To prod Panasonic, Musk and Straubel came up with a charade. At a site near Reno, Nevada, they set up lights and sent in bulldozers to start preparing for construction. Then Straubel invited his counterpart at Panasonic to join him on a viewing platform to watch the work. The message was clear: Tesla was forging

ahead with the factory. Did Panasonic want to be left behind?

It worked. Musk and Straubel were invited to Japan by Panasonic’s new young president Kazuhiro Tsuga. “It was a come-to-Jesus session where we had to make him truly commit that we were going to build the insane Gigafactory together,” Straubel says.

The dinner was a formal, multicourse affair at a traditional low-table Japanese restaurant. Straubel was fearful about how Musk would behave. “Elon can be so much hell and brimstone in meetings and just unpredictable as all get out,” he says. “But I’ve also seen him flip a switch and suddenly be this incredibly effective, charismatic, high-emotional-intelligence business person, when he has to do it.” At the Panasonic dinner, the charming Musk appeared. He sketched out his vision for moving the world to electric vehicles and why the two companies should do it together. “I was mildly shocked and impressed, because, whoa, this is not like how Elon usually was on other days,” says Straubel. “He’s a person who’s all over the map, and you don’t know what he’s going to say or do. And then, all of a sudden, he pulls it all together.”

At the dinner, Tsuga agreed to be a 40 percent partner in the Gigafactory. When asked why Panasonic decided to do the deal, he replied, “We are too conservative. We are a ninety-five-year-old company. We have to change. We have to use some of Elon’s thinking.”

Jeff Bezos, the supercharged Amazon billionaire with a boisterous laugh and boyish enthusiasms, pursues his passions with a talent for being, at the same time, both exuberant and methodical. Like Musk, he was a childhood addict of science fiction, racing through the shelves of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein books at his local library.

As a five-year-old in July 1969, he watched television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission that culminated with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. He calls it “a seminal moment” for him. Later, he would fund a series of missions that recovered from the Atlantic Ocean an Apollo 11 engine, which he installed in a niche off the living room of his house in Washington, DC.

His exhilaration about space turned him into one of those hardcore Star Trek fans who knows every episode. As the valedictorian of his high-school class, his speech was about how to colonize planets, build space hotels, and save our planet by finding other places to do manufacturing. “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!” he concluded.

In 2000, after making Amazon the world’s dominant online retailer, Bezos quietly launched a company called Blue Origin, named after the pale blue planet where humans originated. Like Musk, he focused on the idea of building reusable rockets. “How is the situation in the year 2000 different from 1960?” he asks. “What’s different is computer sensors, cameras, software. Being able to land vertically is the kind of problem that can be addressed by technologies that didn’t exist in 1960.”

Like Musk, he embarked on space endeavors as a missionary rather than a mercenary. There are easier ways to make money. Human civilization, he felt, will soon strain the resources of our small planet. That will confront us with a choice: accept static growth or expand to places beyond Earth. “I don’t think stasis is compatible with liberty,” he says. “We can fix that problem in exactly one way: by moving out into the solar system.”

They met in 2004 when Bezos accepted Musk’s invitation to take a tour of SpaceX. Afterward, he was surprised to get a somewhat curt email from Musk expressing annoyance that Bezos had not reciprocated by inviting him to Seattle to see Blue Origin’s factory, so Bezos promptly did. Musk flew up with Justine, toured Blue Origin, then they had dinner with Bezos and his wife MacKenzie. Musk was filled with advice, expressed with his usual intensity. He warned Bezos that he was heading down the wrong path with one idea: “Dude, we tried that and that turned out to be really dumb, so I’m telling you don’t do the dumb thing we did.” Bezos recalls feeling that Musk was a bit too sure of himself, given

that he had not yet successfully launched a rocket. The following year, Musk asked Bezos to have Amazon do a review of Justine’s new book, an urban horror thriller about demon-human hybrids. Bezos explained that he did not tell Amazon what to review, but said that he would personally post a customer review. Musk sent back a brusque reply, but Bezos posted a nice personal review anyway.

Beginning in 2011, SpaceX won a series of contracts from NASA to develop rockets that could take humans to the International Space Station, a task made crucial by the retirement of the Space Shuttle. To fulfill that mission, it needed to add to its facilities at Cape Canaveral’s Pad 40, and Musk set his sights on leasing the most storied launch facility there, Pad 39A.

Pad 39A had been center stage for America’s Space Age dreams, burned into the memories of a television generation that held its collective breath when the countdowns got to “Ten, nine, eight…” Neil Armstrong’s mission to the moon that Bezos watched as a kid blasted off from Pad 39A in 1969, as did the last manned moon mission, in 1972. So did the first Space Shuttle mission, in 1981, and the last, in 2011.

But by 2013, with the Shuttle program grounded and America’s half-century of space aspirations ending with bangs and whimpers, Pad 39A was rusting away and vines were sprouting through its flame trench. NASA was eager to lease it. The obvious customer was Musk, whose Falcon 9 rockets had already launched on cargo missions from the nearby Pad 40, where Obama had visited. But when the lease was put out for bids, Jeff Bezos—for both sentimental and practical reasons—decided to compete for it.

When NASA ended up awarding the lease to SpaceX, Bezos sued. Musk was furious, declaring that it was ridiculous for Blue Origin to contest the lease “when they haven’t even gotten so much as a toothpick to orbit.” He ridiculed Bezos’s rockets, pointing out that they were capable only of popping up to the edge of space and then falling back; they lacked the far greater thrust necessary to break the Earth’s gravity and go into orbit. “If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs,” Musk said. “Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.”

The battle of the sci-fi barons had blasted off. One SpaceX employee bought dozens of inflatable toy unicorns and photographed them in the pad’s flame duct.

Bezos was eventually able to lease a nearby launch complex at Cape Canaveral, Pad 36, which had been the origin of missions to Mars and Venus. So the competition of the boyish billionaires was set to continue. The transfer of these hallowed pads represented, both symbolically and in practice, John F. Kennedy’s torch of space exploration being passed from government to the private sector—from a once-glorious but now sclerotic NASA to a new breed of mission-driven pioneers.

Both Musk and Bezos had a vision for what would make space travel feasible: rockets that were reusable. Bezos’s focus was on creating the sensors and software to guide a rocket to a soft landing on Earth. But that was only part of the challenge. The greater difficulty was to put all of those features on a rocket that was still light enough, and whose engines had enough thrust, to make it into orbit. Musk focused obsessively on this physics problem. He liked to muse, half-jokingly, that we Earthlings live in a gamelike simulation created by clever overlords with a sense of humor. They made gravity on Mars and the moon weak enough that launching into orbit would be easy. But on Earth, the gravity seems perversely calibrated to make reaching orbit just barely possible.

Like a mountain climber paring the contents of his knapsack, Musk obsessed over reducing the weight of his rockets. That has a multiplier effect: removing a bit of weight—by deleting a part, using a lighter material, making simpler welds —results in less fuel needed, which further reduces the mass the engines have to lift. When he walked through SpaceX’s assembly lines, Musk would pause at each station, stare silently, and challenge the team to delete or trim some part. At almost every encounter, he maniacally hammered home the message: “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one.”

Musk brought this message to the 2014 annual black-tie dinner of the century-old Explorers Club in New York City, where he was given the President’s Award. He shared the stage with Bezos, who accepted an award for the work of his team in recovering the engine of Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacecraft. The dinner featured dishes designed to appeal to the overly adventurous, such as scorpions, maggot-covered strawberries, sweet-and-sour cow penis, goat-eyeball martinis, and whole alligators carved tableside.

Musk was introduced with a video showing his successful rocket launches. “You are kind enough not to show our first three launches,” he said. “We’ll have to have a blooper reel at some point.” Then he gave his sermon about the need for a fully reusable rocket. “That’s the thing that will allow us to establish life on Mars,” he said. “Our upcoming launch will have landing legs on the rocket for

the first time.” Reusable rockets could someday get the cost of taking a person to Mars down to $500,000. Most people would not make the trip, he conceded, “but I suspect there are people in this room who would.”

Bezos applauded, but at that moment he was quietly pursuing an unexpected attack. He and Blue Origin had applied for a U.S. patent titled “Sea landing of space launch vehicles,” and a few weeks after the dinner it was granted. The ten-page application described “methods for landing and recovering a booster stage and/or other portions thereof on a platform at sea.” Musk was livid. The idea of landing on ships at sea “is something that’s been discussed for, like, half a century,” he said. “It’s in fictional movies; it’s in multiple proposals; there’s so much prior art, it’s crazy. So, trying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.”

The following year, after SpaceX sued, Bezos agreed to have the patent canceled. But the dispute heightened the rivalry between the two rocket entrepreneurs.

SpaceX, 2014–2015

Viewing a landed booster

Musk’s quest to build a reusable rocket led to the development of an experimental Falcon 9 prototype dubbed “Grasshopper.” It had landing legs and steerable grid fins and could take slow hops up and down to about three thousand feet at the SpaceX test facility in McGregor, Texas. Excited by the progress they were making, Musk invited the SpaceX board there in August 2014 to see the future in action.

It was the second day on the job for Sam Teller, a 240-volt Harvard grad and venture seeker, who had signed on to be Musk’s de facto chief of staff. With a trimmed beard that accentuated his wide smile and alert eyes, he had the emotional receptors and eagerness to please that were missing in his boss. As a former business manager of The Harvard Lampoon, he knew how to harness Musk’s humor and manic intensity (and even brought Musk to a party at the Lampoon’s castle soon after going to work for him).

At its meeting at the McGregor test facility, the SpaceX board discussed designs for the space suits the company was developing, even though they were years away from flying humans. “They’re sitting around seriously discussing plans to build a city on Mars and what people will wear there,” Teller later marveled, “and everyone’s just acting like this is a totally normal conversation.”

The main event for the board was watching the test of a Falcon 9 landing. It was a sun-blasted August day in the Texas desert, with giant crickets swarming, and the board members huddled under a small tent. The rocket was supposed to rise to about three thousand feet, activate its reentry rockets, hover above a pad, and then land erect. But it didn’t. Shortly after liftoff, one of the three engines malfunctioned and the rocket exploded.

After a few moments of silence, Musk reverted to adventure-boy mode. He told the site manager to get the van so they could drive over to the smoldering debris. “You can’t,” the manager said. “Too dangerous.”

“We’re going,” Musk said. “If it’s going to explode, we might as well walk through burning debris. How often do you get to do that?”

Everyone laughed nervously and followed along. It was like a set from a Ridley Scott movie, with craters in the ground, the scrub grass on fire, and charred pieces of metal. Steve Jurvetson asked Musk if they could grab some pieces as souvenirs. “Sure,” he said, collecting some himself. Antonio Gracias tried to cheer everyone up by saying how the best lessons in life come from failures. “Given the options,” Musk replied, “I prefer to learn from success.”

It was the beginning of a bad stretch not just for SpaceX but for the entire

industry. A rocket made by Orbital Sciences exploded on a mission to deliver cargo to the Space Station. Then a Russian cargo mission failed. The astronauts on the Space Station were in danger of running out of food and supplies. So a lot was riding on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 cargo mission scheduled for June 28, 2015, Musk’s forty-fourth birthday.

But two minutes after liftoff, a strut in the second stage that held a helium tank buckled, and the rocket exploded. After seven years of successful launches, it was the first time that a Falcon 9 failed.

In the meantime, Bezos was making some progress. In November 2015, he launched a rocket on an eleven-minute, sixty-two-mile up-and-down hop to the altitude that is considered the beginning of outer space. Guided by a GPS system and steering fins, the rocket returned to Earth and its booster engine reignited to slow the descent. With its landing legs deployed, it hovered just above the ground, adjusted its coordinates, and landed gently.

Bezos announced the success on a press call the next day. “Full reuse is a game changer,” he said. Then he unleashed his first-ever tweet: “The rarest of beasts—a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy but done right can look easy.”

Musk was annoyed. It was, he felt, just a suborbital hop, not what he considered the true holy grail of launching a payload into orbit. So he unleashed a rejoinder on Twitter: “@JeffBezos Not quite ‘rarest.’ SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights 3 years ago & is still around.”

In fact, the Grasshopper had flown only about three thousand feet up, which was one-hundredth as far as Blue Origin’s rocket. But Musk was right in the distinction he made. Rockets that could hop up and back to the edge of space might be fun for space tourists, but it would take rockets with the power of the Falcon 9 to do missions such as launching satellites and reaching the International Space Station. Landing and reusing such a rocket would be an accomplishment of a different order of magnitude.

Musk’s opportunity to do that came on December 21, 2015, just four weeks after Bezos’s suborbital flight.

In his relentless quest to conquer gravity, Musk had redesigned the Falcon 9. The new version packed more liquid oxygen fuel onto the rocket by supercooling it to minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit, which made it much more dense. As always, he was looking for every way possible to cram more power into a rocket without significantly increasing its size or mass. “Elon kept hammering

at us to eke out a tiny percent more efficiency by chilling down the fuel more and more,” says Mark Juncosa. “It was ingenious, but it was giving us a real pain in the ass.” A few times Juncosa pushed back, saying it would present challenges with valves and leaks, but Musk was unrelenting. “There is no first-principles reason this can’t work,” he said. “It’s extraordinarily difficult, I know, but you just have to muscle through.”

“I was just crapping in my pants during the countdown,” Juncosa says. Suddenly he noticed something worrisome on the video feed from the cavity between the first and second stages. There were some drips, and he didn’t know whether they were liquid nitrogen, which would be okay, or liquid oxygen from the supercooled tank, which might be a problem. “I was scared as hell,” Juncosa recalls. “If it was my company, I would have shut it down.”

“You got to call this one,” Juncosa told Musk as the countdown got down to the final minute.

Musk paused for a few seconds. How risky would it be if there was some liquid oxygen in the interstage? Risky, but only a small risk. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s just go.”

Years later, Juncosa watched footage of the moment Musk made that decision. “I thought he had done some complex quick calculations to decide what to do, but in fact he just shrugged his shoulders and gave the order. He had an intuition of what the physics were.”

He was right. The liftoff went flawlessly.

Then came the ten-minute wait to see if the booster would return and land safely on the landing pad that SpaceX had built about a mile from Pad 39A. Just after the second stage separated, the booster fired its thrusters to flip around, head back toward the Cape, point its bottom downward, and slow its descent. With its GPS and sensors guiding it and its grid fins helping to steer, it eased down toward the landing pad. (Pause for a second and think how amazing all that is.)

Musk bolted out of the control room and ran across the highway, staring into the dark to watch the rocket reappear. “Come on down, come on down slowly,” he whispered as he stood by the highway, arms akimbo. Then there was a boom. “Oh shit,” he said, turning around and walking dejectedly back across the highway.

But inside the control room, there were loud cheers. The monitors were showing the rocket erect on the pad, and the launch announcer echoed the words that had been used by Neil Armstrong on the moon: “The Falcon has landed.” The loud sound, it turned out, was the sonic boom from the rocket’s

reentry into the upper atmosphere.

One of the flight engineers ran out of the control room with the news. “It’s standing on the pad!” she shouted. Musk turned around and did his fast lumber back toward the pad. “Holy fucking shit,” he kept saying to himself. “Holy fucking shit.”

That night, they all went to a waterfront bar called Fishlips to party. Musk hoisted a beer. “We just launched and landed the biggest rocket in the world!” he shouted to the hundred or so employees and other amazed onlookers. As the crowd chanted “USA, USA,” he jumped up and down, pumping his fists into the air.

“Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage,” Bezos wrote in a tweet. “Welcome to the club!” Swaddled in his gauze of graciousness was a stiletto jab: the claim that the booster SpaceX landed was “suborbital,” putting it in the same club as the booster that Blue Origin had landed. Technically he was right. The SpaceX booster had never gone into orbit itself, just boosted a payload that did. But Musk was furious. The ability to send a payload into orbit put the SpaceX rocket, he believed, in a different league.

2012–2015

Taking on a Sumo wrestler

With Talulah

With Navaid Farooq

When Talulah Riley married Musk in 2010, she moved to California and pretty much gave up her acting career. An only child, she had dreamed of having many children, and in the pictures she drew there were always twin blond boys. “When I met Elon, he had five children and the oldest were these gorgeous little blondhaired twins that felt like they jumped up out of my imagination.” But cautious about their relationship, she decided not to have kids of her own with him.

She continued to choreograph parties for Musk, as she had done in Scotland for their wedding and on the Orient Express for his fortieth birthday. For his forty-first, she rented a stately home in the English countryside and used as the theme Flying Down to Rio, based on the 1933 film that first paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and culminates with a dance sequence on the wings of an airplane. She hired the Breitling Wingwalkers, and guests were taught how to wingwalk on a biplane.

But Musk missed most of the party and instead spent time in his room on the phone dealing with various issues at Tesla and SpaceX. He liked to focus on work. At times he treated the rest of life as an unpleasant distraction. “The sheer amount of time that I spent at work was so extreme that any relationship was very difficult to maintain,” he admits. “SpaceX and Tesla were difficult individually. Doing them both at the same time was almost impossible. So it was just all work all the time.”

Maye Musk sympathized with Talulah. “She would invite me for dinner, and Elon wouldn’t show because he’s working late,” she says. “She loved him to bits, but she understandably got tired of being treated that way.”

When his mind was on work, which was most of the time, Talulah didn’t know how to get through to him. He always seemed to be in a death struggle over some issue, which was such a contrast to life in her hometown English village, where everyone at the pub and church were so friendly. “I felt this was not the life I should be living,” she says. “I hated Los Angeles and I was terribly homesick for England.”

So in 2012, she filed for divorce and moved to an apartment in Santa Monica while their lawyers worked out a settlement. But when they met in court four months later to sign the agreement, the story took a cinematic twist. “I saw Elon there, standing in front of the judge, and he sort of asked, ‘What the hell are we doing,’ and then we started kissing,” she says. “I think the judge thought we were crazy.” Musk asked her to come back to his house and see the boys. “They’ve been wondering where you are.” And so she did.

They went through with the divorce, but she ended up moving back in with him. To celebrate they took a road trip in a new Model S with the five kids. He also brought her to lunch with the Esquire writer Tom Junod. Her main job, she

told Junod, was keeping Musk from going king-crazy. “You’ve never heard that term?” she asked. “It means that people become king, and then they go crazy.”

For his forty-second birthday, in June 2013, Talulah rented an ersatz castle in Tarrytown, New York, just north of New York City, and invited forty friends. The theme this time was Japanese steampunk, and Musk and the other men were dressed as samurai warriors. There was a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which had been rewritten slightly to feature Musk as the Japanese emperor, and a demonstration by a knife-thrower. Musk, never one to avoid risks, even needless ones, put a pink balloon just underneath his groin for the knife-thrower to target while blindfolded.

The culmination was a demonstration of Sumo wrestling. At the end, the group’s 350-pound champion invited Musk into the ring. “I went full strength at him to try a judo throw, because I thought he was trying to take it easy on me,” Musk says. “I decided to see if I could throw this guy, and I did. But I also blew out a disc at the base of my neck.”

Ever since, Musk has suffered severe bouts of back and neck pain; he would end up having three operations to try to repair his C5-C6 intervertebral disc. During meetings at the Tesla or SpaceX factories, he would sometimes lie flat on the floor with an ice pack at the base of his neck.

A few weeks after the Tarrytown party, in July 2013, he and Talulah decided to remarry. This time it was a very low-key affair in their dining room. Not all fairy tales, however, end happily ever after. Musk’s obsession with work continued to plague their relationship. “So the same thing happened again, and I wanted to go back home,” she says. She restarted her film career by writing, directing, and starring in a comedy called Scottish Mussel about a hapless criminal who decides to poach pearl mussels from rivers. When Musk and the boys came to visit her during the filming, she told him she wanted to stay in England and get divorced again.

After some hesitations and reconciliations, she made the final decision on her thirtieth birthday, in September 2015. She finished filming the HBO series Westworld in Los Angeles, then moved back to England for good. But she made him a promise. “You’re my Mr. Rochester,” she said, referring to the brooding husband in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. “And if Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come to you and take care of you.”

OpenAI, 2012–2015

With Sam Altman

Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder who had invested in SpaceX, holds a conference each year with the leaders of companies financed by his Founders Fund. At the 2012 gathering, Musk met Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist, videogame designer, and artificial intelligence researcher with a courteous manner that conceals a competitive mind. A chess prodigy at age four, he became the fivetime champion of an international Mind Sports Olympiad that includes competition in chess, poker, Mastermind, and backgammon.

In his modern London office is an original edition of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which proposed an “imitation game” that would pit a human against a ChatGPT–like machine. If the responses of the two were indistinguishable, he wrote, then it would be reasonable to say that machines could “think.” Influenced by Turing’s argument, Hassabis cofounded a company called DeepMind that sought to design computer-based neural networks that could achieve artificial general intelligence. In other words, it sought to make machines that could learn how to think like humans.

“Elon and I hit it off right away, and I went to visit him at his rocket factory,” Hassabis says. While sitting in the canteen overlooking the assembly lines, Musk explained that his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse. Hassabis added another potential threat to the list: artificial intelligence. Machines could become superintelligent and surpass us mere mortals, perhaps even decide to dispose of us. Musk paused silently for almost a minute as he processed this possibility. During such trancelike periods, he says, he runs visual simulations about the ways that multiple factors may play out over the years. He decided that Hassabis might be right about the danger of AI, and he invested $5 million in DeepMind as a way to monitor what it was doing.

A few weeks after his conversations with Hassabis, Musk described DeepMind to Google’s Larry Page. They had known each other for more than a decade, and Musk often stayed at Page’s Palo Alto house. The potential dangers of artificial intelligence became a topic that Musk would raise, almost obsessively, during their late-night conversations. Page was dismissive.

At Musk’s 2013 birthday party in Napa Valley, they got into a passionate debate in front of the other guests, including Luke Nosek and Reid Hoffman. Musk argued that unless we built in safeguards, artificial intelligence systems might replace humans, making our species irrelevant or even extinct.

Page pushed back. Why would it matter, he asked, if machines someday surpassed humans in intelligence, even consciousness? It would simply be the next stage of evolution.

Human consciousness, Musk retorted, was a precious flicker of light in the universe, and we should not let it be extinguished. Page considered that sentimental nonsense. If consciousness could be replicated in a machine, why would that not be just as valuable? Perhaps we might even be able someday to upload our own consciousness into a machine. He accused Musk of being a “specist,” someone who was biased in favor of their own species. “Well, yes, I am pro-human,” Musk responded. “I fucking like humanity, dude.”

Musk was therefore dismayed when he heard at the end of 2013 that Page and Google were planning to buy DeepMind. Musk and his friend Luke Nosek tried to put together financing to stop the deal. At a party in Los Angeles, they went to an upstairs closet for an hour-long Skype call with Hassabis. “The future of AI should not be controlled by Larry,” Musk told him.

The effort failed, and Google’s acquisition of DeepMind was announced in January 2014. Page initially agreed to create a “safety council,” with Musk as a member. The first and only meeting was held at SpaceX. Page, Hassabis, and Google chair Eric Schmidt attended, along with Reid Hoffman and a few others. “Elon’s takeaway was the council was basically bullshit,” says Sam Teller, then his chief of staff. “These Google guys have no intention of focusing on AI safety or doing anything that would limit their power.”

Musk proceeded to publicly warn of the danger. “Our biggest existential threat,” he told a 2014 symposium at MIT, “is probably artificial intelligence.” When Amazon announced its chatbot digital assistant, Alexa, that year, followed by a similar product from Google, Musk began to warn about what would happen when these systems became smarter than humans. They could surpass us and begin treating us as pets. “I don’t love the idea of being a house cat,” he said. The best way to prevent a problem was to ensure that AI remained tightly aligned and partnered with humans. “The danger comes when artificial intelligence is decoupled from human will.”

So Musk began hosting a series of dinner discussions that included members of his old PayPal mafia, including Thiel and Hoffman, on ways to counter Google and promote AI safety. He even reached out to President Obama, who agreed to a one-on-one meeting in May 2015. Musk explained the risk and suggested that it be regulated. “Obama got it,” Musk says. “But I realized that it was not going to rise to the level of something that he would do anything about.”

Musk then turned to Sam Altman, a tightly bundled software entrepreneur, sports car enthusiast, and survivalist who, behind his polished veneer, had a Musk-like intensity. Altman had met Musk a few years earlier and spent three hours with him in conversation as they toured the SpaceX factory. “It was funny how some of the engineers would scatter or look away when they saw Elon coming,” Altman says. “They were afraid of him. But I was impressed by how

much detail he understood about every little piece of the rocket.”

At a small dinner in Palo Alto, Altman and Musk decided to cofound a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab, which they named OpenAI. It would make its software open-source and try to counter Google’s growing dominance of the field. Thiel and Hoffman joined Musk in putting up the money. “We wanted to have something like a Linux version of AI that was not controlled by any one person or corporation,” Musk says. “The goal was to increase the probability that AI would develop in a safe way that would be beneficial to humanity.”

One question they discussed at dinner was what would be safer: a small number of AI systems that were controlled by big corporations or a large number of independent systems? They concluded that a large number of competing systems, providing checks and balances on each other, was better. Just as humans work collectively to stop evil actors, so too would a large collection of independent AI bots work to stop bad bots. For Musk, this was the reason to make OpenAI truly open, so that lots of people could build systems based on its source code. “I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI,” he told Wired’s Steven Levy at the time.

One goal that Musk and Altman discussed at length, which would become a hot topic in 2023 after OpenAI launched a chatbot called ChatGPT, was known as “AI alignment.” It aims to make sure that AI systems are aligned with human goals and values, just as Isaac Asimov set forth rules to prevent the robots in his novels from harming humanity. Think of the computer Hal that runs amok and battles its human creators in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What guardrails and kill switches can we humans put on AI systems so that they remain aligned with our interests, and who among us should get to determine what those interests are?

One way to assure AI alignment, Musk felt, was to tie the bots closely to humans. They should be an extension of the will of individuals, rather than systems that could go rogue and develop their own goals and intentions. That would become one of the rationales for Neuralink, the company he would found to create chips that could connect human brains directly to computers.

He also realized that success in the field of artificial intelligence would come from having access to huge amounts of real-world data that the bots could learn from. One such gold mine, he realized at the time, was Tesla, which collected millions of frames of video each day of drivers handling different situations. “Probably Tesla will have more real-world data than any other company in the world,” he said. Another trove of data, he would later come to realize, was Twitter, which by 2023 was processing 500 million posts per day from humans.

Among those at the dinners with Musk and Altman was a research engineer at Google, Ilya Sutskever. They were able to lure him away, with a $1.9 million salary and starting bonus, to be the chief scientist of the new lab. Page was furious. Not only was his erstwhile friend and houseguest starting a rival lab; he was poaching Google’s top scientists. After the launch of OpenAI at the end of 2015, they barely spoke again. “Larry felt betrayed and was really mad at me for personally recruiting Ilya, and he refused to hang out with me anymore,” Musk says. “And I was like, ‘Larry, if you just hadn’t been so cavalier about AI safety then it wouldn’t really be necessary to have some countervailing force.’ ”

Musk’s interest in artificial intelligence would lead him to launch an array of related projects. These include Neuralink, which aims to plant microchips in human brains; Optimus, a humanlike robot; and Dojo, a supercomputer that can use millions of videos to train an artificial neural network to simulate a human brain. It also spurred him to become obsessed with pushing to make Tesla cars self-driving. At first these endeavors were rather independent, but eventually Musk would tie them all together, along with a new chatbot company he founded called X.AI, to pursue the goal of artificial general intelligence.

Musk’s determination to develop artificial intelligence capabilities at his own companies caused a break with OpenAI in 2018. He tried to convince Altman that OpenAI, which he thought was falling behind Google, should be folded into Tesla. The OpenAI team rejected that idea, and Altman stepped in as president of the lab, starting a for-profit arm that was able to raise equity funding.

So Musk decided to forge ahead with building a rival AI team to work on Tesla Autopilot. Even as he was struggling with the production hell surges in Nevada and Fremont, he recruited Andrej Karpathy, a specialist in deep learning and computer vision, away from OpenAI. “We realized that Tesla was going to become an AI company and would be competing for the same talent as OpenAI,” Altman says. “It pissed some of our team off, but I fully understood what was happening.” Altman would turn the tables in 2023 by hiring Karpathy back after he became exhausted working for Musk.

Franz von Holzhausen with an early “Robotaxi”

Musk had discussed with Larry Page the possibility of Tesla and Google working together to build an autopilot system that would allow cars to be self-driving. But their falling-out over artificial intelligence spurred Musk to accelerate plans for Tesla to build a system on its own.

Google’s autopilot program, eventually named Waymo, used a laser-radar device known as LiDAR, an acronym for “light detection and ranging.” Musk resisted the use of LiDAR and other radar-like instruments, insisting that a selfdriving system should use only visual data from cameras. It was a case of first principles: humans drove using only visual data; therefore machines should be able to. It was also an issue of cost. As always, Musk focused not just on the design of a product but also on how it would be manufactured in large numbers. “The problem with Google’s approach is that the sensor system is too expensive,” he said in 2013. “It’s better to have an optical system, basically cameras with software that is able to figure out what’s going on just by looking at things.”

Over the next decade, Musk would engage in a tug-of-war with his engineers, many of whom wanted to include some form of radar in Tesla’s self-driving cars. Dhaval Shroff, a sparky young engineer from Mumbai who joined Tesla’s Autopilot team in 2014 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon, remembers one of his first meetings with Musk. “Back then we had radar hardware in the car, and we told Elon that it was best safety-wise to use it,” says Shroff. “He agreed to let us keep radar in, but it was clear that he thought we should eventually be able to rely on camera vision only.”

By 2015, Musk was spending hours each week working with the Autopilot team. He would drive from his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles to the SpaceX headquarters near the airport, where they would discuss the problems his Autopilot system encountered. “Every meeting started with Elon saying, ‘Why can’t the car drive itself from my home to work?’ ” says Drew Baglino, one of Tesla’s senior vice presidents.

This sometimes led the Tesla team to do some Keystone Kops scrambling. There was a curve on Interstate 405 that always caused Musk trouble because the lane markings were faded. The Autopilot would swerve out of the lane and almost hit oncoming cars. Musk would come into the office furious. “Do something to program this right,” he kept demanding. This went on for months as the team tried to improve the Autopilot software.

In desperation, Sam Teller and others came up with a simpler solution: ask the transportation department to repaint the lanes of that section of the

highway. When they got no response, they came up with a more audacious plan. They decided to rent a line-painting machine of their own, go out at 3 a.m., shut the highway down for an hour, and redo the lanes. They had gone as far as tracking down a line-painting machine when someone finally got through to a person at the transportation department who was a Musk fan. He agreed to have the lines repainted if he and a few others at the department could get a tour of SpaceX. Teller gave them a tour, they posed for a picture, and the highway lines got repainted. After that, Musk’s Autopilot handled the curve well.

Baglino was among the Tesla engineers who wanted to continue to use radar to supplement camera vision. “There was just such a gulf between Elon’s goal and the possible,” says Baglino. “He just wasn’t aware enough of the challenges.” At one point Baglino’s team did an analysis of the distance perception an autopilot system would need for situations such as at a stop sign. How far left and right did the car need to see in order to know when it could safely cross? “We’re trying to have those conversations with Elon to establish what the sensors would need to do,” Baglino says. “And they were really difficult conversations, because he kept coming back to the fact that people have just two eyes and they can drive the car. But those eyes are attached to a neck, and the neck can move, and people can position those eyes all over the place.”

Musk relented for the time being. Each new Model S, he conceded, would be equipped not only with eight cameras but also with twelve ultrasonic sensors plus a forward-facing radar that was able to see through rain and fog. “Together, this system provides a view of the world that a driver alone cannot access, seeing in every direction simultaneously and on wavelengths that go far beyond the human senses,” the Tesla website announced in 2016. But even as Musk made this concession, it was clear that he would not give up pushing to make a camera-only system work.

As Musk pursued his autonomous-vehicle ideas, he stubbornly and repeatedly exaggerated the Autopilot capability of Tesla cars. That was dangerous; it led some drivers to think they could ride in a Tesla without paying much attention. Even as Musk was making his grand promises in 2016, Tesla was being dropped by one of its camera suppliers, Mobileye. Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety,” its chairman said.

It was inevitable that there would be some fatal accidents involving Autopilot, just as there were without Autopilot. Musk insisted that the system should be judged not on whether it prevented accidents but instead on whether it led to fewer accidents. It was a logical stance, but it ignored the emotional reality that a person killed by an Autopilot system would provoke a lot more

horror than a hundred deaths caused by driver error.

The first reported case of a fatal accident involving Autopilot in the U.S. came in May 2016. A driver was killed in Florida when a tractor-trailer truck made a left turn in front of his Tesla. “Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied,” Tesla said in a statement. Investigators found evidence that, at the time of the crash, the driver was watching a Harry Potter movie on a computer propped on the dashboard. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that “the driver neglected to maintain complete control of the Tesla leading up to the crash.” Tesla had oversold its Autopilot capabilities, and the driver likely surmised that he did not have to pay close attention. There were reports of another fatal accident, involving a Tesla that was probably in Autopilot mode, that had occurred in China earlier that year.

The news about the Florida crash broke when Musk was on his first visit back to South Africa in sixteen years. He immediately flew back to the United States, but he did not make any public statement. He had the mind of an engineer rather than a feel for human emotions. He could not understand why one or two deaths caused by Tesla Autopilot created an outcry when there were more than 1.3 million traffic deaths annually. Nobody was tallying the accidents prevented and lives saved by Autopilot. Nor were they assessing whether driving with Autopilot was safer than driving without it.

Musk held a conference call with reporters in October 2016, and he got angry when the first questions were about the two deaths. If they wrote stories that dissuaded people from using autonomous driving systems, or regulators from approving them, “then you are killing people.” He paused and then barked, “Next question.”

Musk’s grand vision—sometimes akin to a mirage that kept receding into the horizon—was that Tesla would build a completely autonomous car that would drive itself without any human intervention. He believed that would transform our daily lives as well as make Tesla the world’s most valuable company. “Full Self-Driving,” as Tesla began to call it, would be able to function, Musk promised, not only on highways but also on city streets with pedestrians, cyclists, and complex intersections.

As with his other mission-driven obsessions, including travel to Mars, he made what would turn out to be absurd predictions about timing. On his October 2016 call with reporters, he declared that by the end of the following year, a Tesla would be able to drive from Los Angeles to New York “without the

need for a single touch” on the wheel. “When you want your car to return, tap Summon on your phone,” he said. “It will eventually find you even if you are on the other side of the country.”

This could have been dismissed as an amusing fantasy, except that he began pushing the engineers working on Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y to design versions that had no steering wheel and no pedals for acceleration and braking. Von Holzhausen pretended to comply. Beginning in late 2016, there would always be pictures and physical models of “Robotaxis” for Musk to see when he walked through the design studio. “He was convinced that by the time we got Model Y into production it would be a full-on Robotaxi, fully autonomous,” von Holzhausen says.

Almost every year, Musk would make another prediction that Full SelfDriving was just a year or two away. “When will someone be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they’ve arrived?” Chris Anderson asked him at a TED Talk in May 2017. “That’s about two years,” Musk replied. In an interview with Kara Swisher at a Code Conference at the end of 2018, he said Tesla was “on track to do it next year.” In early 2019, he doubled down. “I think we will be feature complete, Full Self-Driving, this year,” he declared on a podcast with ARK Invest. “I would say I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.”

“If he lets up and admits that it’s going to take a long time,” von Holzhausen said at the end of 2022, “then nobody will rally around it and we won’t design vehicles that require autonomy.” On an earnings call with analysts that year, Musk admitted that the process had been harder than he expected back in 2016. “Ultimately, what it comes down to,” he said, “is that to solve Full Self-Driving, you actually have to solve real-world artificial intelligence.”

Solar

Tesla Energy, 2004–2016

Lyndon and Peter Rive

“I want to start a new business,” Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive said as they were driving in an RV to Burning Man, the annual art-and-tech rave in the Nevada desert, at the end of the summer of 2004. “One that can help humanity and address climate change.”

“Get into the solar industry,” Musk replied.

Lyndon recalls that the answer felt like “my marching orders.” With his brother Peter, he started work on creating a company that would become SolarCity. “Elon provided most of the initial funding,” Peter recalls. “He gave us one clear piece of guidance: get to a scale that would have an impact as fast as possible.”

Musk’s three Rive cousins—Lyndon, Peter, and Russ—were the sons of Maye Musk’s twin sister, and they had grown up with Elon and Kimbal, riding bikes and fighting and plotting ways to make money. Like Elon, they headed to America to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams as soon as they could leave South Africa. The whole clan, Peter says, followed the same maxim: “Risk is a type of fuel.”

Lyndon, the youngest, was especially tenacious. His passion was playing underwater hockey, which may be the ultimate tenacity-testing sport, and he had come to America as a member of the South African national team. He stayed in Elon’s apartment, liked the vibe in Silicon Valley, and took the lead in forming with his brothers a computer support company. They would zip around Santa Cruz on skateboards making service calls. Eventually they came up with their own software to automate many of the tasks, which helped them sell the company to Dell Computers.

After Elon suggested they go into the solar-panel business, Lyndon and Peter tried to figure out why so few people were buying them. The answer was easy. “We realized that the consumer experience was horrible and the high upfront cost was a massive barrier,” Peter says. So they came up with a plan to simplify the process. A customer would call a toll-free number, a sales team would use satellite imagery to gauge the size of the roof and how much sunlight it got, and then the company would offer a contract specifying the cost, utility savings, and financing terms. If a customer agreed, the company would dispatch a team in green uniforms to install the panels and apply for government rebates. The goal was to create a nationwide consumer brand. Musk invested $10 million to get the company started. On July 4, 2006—just when Tesla was about to reveal the Roadster—they launched SolarCity, with Musk as chairman of the board.

For a while, SolarCity did pretty well. By 2015, it accounted for a quarter of all solar installations not done by a utility company. But it struggled to find a business model. At first it leased the solar panels to customers with no upfront cost. This led to mounting debt for the company, and the stock declined from a high of $85 per share in 2014 to about $20 a share in mid-2016.

Musk became increasingly frustrated with the company’s practices, especially the way it relied on an aggressive sales force that was compensated by commissions. “Their sales tactics became like those schemes that go door to door selling you boxes of knives or something crappy like that,” Musk says. His instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.

Musk began hounding his cousins. “Are you a sales company or a product company?” he kept asking. They couldn’t quite understand his fixation on product. “We would be kicking ass on market share,” Peter says, “and Elon would be questioning aesthetic things and pointing out something like the look of the clips and get angry and say they were ugly.” Musk became so frustrated that at one point he threatened to resign as chairman. Kimbal talked him out of it. Instead, in February 2016, he phoned his cousins and told them that he wanted Tesla to buy SolarCity.

After opening its Nevada battery factory, Tesla had begun making a refrigeratorsize battery for the home, called the Powerwall. It could be connected to solar panels, such as those installed by SolarCity. The concept helped Musk avoid the mistake made by many corporate leaders of defining their business too narrowly. “Tesla is not just an automotive company,” he said when the Powerwall was announced in April 2015. “It’s an energy innovation company.”

With a solar roof connected to a home battery and to a Tesla in the garage, people could free themselves from dependency on big utilities and oil companies. The combined offerings could enable Tesla to do more to fight climate change than any other company—perhaps any other entity—in the world. There was, however, a problem with Musk’s integrated energy concept: his cousins’ solar business was not part of Tesla. Having Tesla buy SolarCity would accomplish two things: allow him to integrate the home energy business and save his cousins’ foundering enterprise.

At first the board of Tesla balked, which was unusual. They were normally very deferential to Musk. The proposed deal seemed like a bailout of Musk’s cousins and Musk’s SolarCity investment at a time when Tesla was suffering its

own production problems. But the board approved the idea four months later, after SolarCity’s financial condition worsened. Tesla would offer a rather high 25 percent premium for the purchase of SolarCity’s stock, of which Musk was the largest holder. Musk recused himself from a few of the board votes, but he participated in many of the private discussions with his cousins at SolarCity.

When Musk announced the deal in June 2016, he called it a “no-brainer” that was “legally and morally correct.” The acquisition fit with his original “master plan” for Tesla, which he had written in 2006: “The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.”

It also fit with Musk’s instinct to have end-to-end control of all his endeavors. “Elon made us realize that you’ve got to have solar and battery combined,” says his cousin Peter. “We really wanted to offer an integrated product, but it was difficult when the engineers were at two different companies.”

The deal received approval by 85 percent of “disinterested” shareholders (meaning Musk couldn’t vote his shares) of both Tesla and SolarCity. Nevertheless, some Tesla shareholders sued. “Elon caused Tesla’s servile Board to approve the acquisition of an insolvent SolarCity at a patently unfair price, in order to bail out his (and other family members’) foundering investment,” they charged. In 2022, a Delaware chancery court ruled in Musk’s favor: “The acquisition marked a vital step forward for a company that had for years made clear to the market and its stockholders that it intended to expand from an electric car manufacturer to an alternative energy company.”

On a call with SolarCity investors in August 2016, just before the shareholder votes that would finalize the merger with Tesla, Musk hinted at a new product that would transform the industry. “What if we can offer you a roof that looks way better than a normal roof? That lasts far longer than a normal roof? Different ballgame.”

The idea that he and his Rive cousins were working on was a “solar roof” rather than solar panels that could be installed on top of a regular roof. It would be made of tiles that had solar cells embedded inside them. The solar tiles could replace the existing roof or be laid on top of it. Either way it would look like a roof rather than a bunch of solar panels mounted on a roof.

The solar roof project caused enormous friction between Musk and his cousins. In August 2016, around the time he was teasing the new product, Peter Rive invited Musk to inspect a version that the company had installed on a customer’s roof. It was a standing-seam metal roof, meaning the solar cells were

embedded in sheets of metal rather than tiles.

When Musk drove up, Peter and fifteen people were standing in front of the house. “But as often happened,” Peter recalled, “Elon showed up late and then sat in the car looking at his phone while we all just waited very nervously for him to get out.” When he did, it was clear that he was furious. “This is shit,” Musk explained. “Total fucking shit. Horrible. What were you thinking?” Peter explained that it was the best they could do in a short time to make a version that was installable. That meant they had to compromise on aesthetics. Musk ordered them to focus instead on solar tiles rather than a metal roof.

Working around the clock, the Rives and their SolarCity team were able to mock up some solar tiles, and Musk scheduled a public unveiling for October. It was held on the Universal Studios Hollywood lot, where the solar roof options were mounted on a set of homes that had been used in the Desperate Housewives TV series. There were four versions, including those that looked like French slate and Tuscan barrel tiles, along with a house that featured the metal roof that Musk hated. When Musk visited two days before the scheduled event and saw the metal version, he erupted. “What part of ‘I fucking hate this product’ don’t you understand?” One of the engineers pushed back, saying it looked okay to him and that it was the easiest to install. Musk pulled Peter aside and told him, “I don’t think this guy should be on the team.” Peter fired the engineer and had the metal roof removed before the public event.

Two hundred people showed up at Universal Studios for the presentation. Musk began by talking about rising carbon dioxide levels and the threat of climate change. “Save us, Elon!” someone shouted. At that point Musk pointed behind him. “The houses you see around you are all solar houses,” he said. “Did you notice?”

Inside each of the garages was an upgraded version of Tesla’s Powerwall along with a Tesla car. The solar tiles would generate electricity that could be stored in the Powerwall and in the battery of the car. “This is the integrated future,” he said. “We can solve the whole energy equation.”