Elon Musk

South Africa

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

“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.

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…

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,…

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…

…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…

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…

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…

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…

He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. “It…

…he admits that he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness. “Their experiences with me would have…

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…

“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…

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.”

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.”

While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.

“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.”

“I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with 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.

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.

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.

After producing profits of roughly $210,000, his emerald business collapsed in the 1980s when the Russians created an artificial emerald in the lab.

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.

…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…

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.

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.

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.

…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.”

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.

‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’ ”

…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 he was eight, he focused his determination on getting a motorcycle. Yes, at age eight.

His father finally caved and got Elon a blue-and-gold 50cc Yamaha.

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

…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.”

“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.

“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.

…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.

“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.

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.

Errol was bizarrely averse to computers, claiming they were good only for time-wasting games, not engineering.

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.

…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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

“Can you imagine growing up like that?” Kimbal asks. “It was mental torture, and it infects you. You end up asking, ‘What is reality?’ ”

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.”

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

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 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.

…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.

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.

“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.”

…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.”

“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.

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 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.

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.

…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.

Canada & College

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

Although Elon loved the vibe of the parties, he never got fully immersed in them. “I was stone cold sober at the time,”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 over-automated, and they underestimated the complexity of what they were building,” he says.

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.”

Zip2

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.

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.

…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.”

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.

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.”

“We would all be exhausted except Elon. He was always up late doing the coding.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“Great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers,” Musk told Inc. Magazine. “They don’t have the creativity or the insight.”

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.

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.

X.com & PayPal

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.”

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.

Some of his friends were skeptical that an online bank would inspire confidence if given a name that sounded like a porn site.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

…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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

Risk & Illness

“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.”

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.

“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.’ ”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

SpaceX Vision

“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.”

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.

He found it surprising—and frightening—that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide.

“The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he says. “This is a land of adventurers.”

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.

“I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”

…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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

…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.

SpaceX Culture

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.

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.

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.”

As his team grew, Musk infused it with his tolerance for risk and reality-bending 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.”

But it was also a good way to become surrounded by people afraid to give you bad news or question a decision.

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 few years, SpaceX was making in-house 70 percent of the components of its rockets.

…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.

All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

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.”

“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.

…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.”

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.

“It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”

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.”

“We need to get the hell out of Mojave,” Mueller told Musk. “California is difficult.”

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.”

Musk pulled him aside. “Stop saying how good all this is,” he said. “You’re making it more expensive.”

“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.

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.

…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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

…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.

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.

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.

Tesla Begins

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

…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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

…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.

In the early days of Henry Ford and other pioneers, carmakers did most of the work in-house. 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.

Both Eberhard and Musk considered themselves to be the main founder of Tesla.

“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.

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 supply-chain 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.

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.

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.

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.

Falcon 1

…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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

…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…

“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.”

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.”

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

Roadster Reality

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

…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.

“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.

He cannot figure out why Musk, after fifteen years, is still so fervent about disparaging him.

…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.

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.

Despite the no-disparagement clause, Musk would not be able to stop himself from bursting out in anger every few months.

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 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.

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.”

Musk awoke with stomach pains, which was not unusual. He can pretend to like stress, but his stomach can’t.

…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.

2008 Brink

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

…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.

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.

…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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

…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.

…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.

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.

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.

…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.’ ”

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 than anyone.

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…

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

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?”

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.”

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.

Tesla Survival

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.

Musk got angry. “We’ve got to do this right away or we’ll miss payroll,” he told Salzman.

Musk felt that Salzman relished the chance to look him in the eye and say no, which is what happened.

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.

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.

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 fuel-efficient cars. Ford, Nissan, and Fisker Automotive also got loans.

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.

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.

“If Daimler had not invested in Tesla at that time we would have died,” Musk says.

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…

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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

…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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

Scaling Machines

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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 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.

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.

“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.

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.

Tesla was almost dead at the end of 2008. Now, just eighteen months later, it had become America’s hottest new company.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Autonomy & AI

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.

But cautious about their relationship, she decided not to have kids of her own with him.

…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.

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.

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.

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.

Musk resisted the use of LiDAR and other radar-like instruments, insisting that a self-driving 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Solar & Hyperloop

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

…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.

…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.

It was a lofty vision, but it came at a personal cost. Within a year, both Peter and Lyndon Rive would leave the company.

Musk had come up with an even more audacious idea a few years earlier, which was to build a pneumatic-like tube with electromagnetically accelerated pods to propel people at close to supersonic speeds between cities. He called it Hyperloop. In an unusual show of restraint, he thought better of attempting to build one and instead set up a design competition for students. He built a mile-long vacuum-chamber tube alongside SpaceX headquarters for them to demonstrate their ideas.

…they were drilling a vertical shaft at the beginning of the tunnel to lower in the tunneling machine. “The gopher in my yard doesn’t do that,” Musk said. They ended up redesigning the tunneling machine so that it could simply be aimed nose down and start burrowing into the ground.

“This is crazy,” Musk exulted. “This is going to change everything.” It didn’t change everything. In fact, it became an example of a Musk idea that was overhyped. The Boring Company completed a 1.7-mile tunnel in Las Vegas in 2021 that transported riders in Teslas from the airport and through the convention center, and it began negotiations for projects in other cities. But by 2023, none of them had gotten underway.

Love & Family

On Trump’s first day as president, Musk went to the White House to be part of a roundtable of top CEOs, and he returned two weeks later for a similar session. He concluded that Trump as president was no different than he was as a candidate. The buffoonery was not just an act. “Trump might be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever,” he says. “Like my dad. Bullshitting can sometimes baffle the brain. If you just think of Trump as sort of a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.” When the president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord, an international agreement to fight climate change, Musk resigned from the presidential councils.

He told her that she reminded him of Mercy, his favorite character in the video game Overwatch, so she spent two months designing and commissioning a head-to-toe costume so she could role-play for him.

“She was like the Joker in Batman,” he says. “She didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.” She and Musk would stay up all night fighting, and then he would not be able to get up until the afternoon.

She locked herself in the room and started yelling that she was afraid she would be attacked and that Elon had taken her passport. The security guards and Kimbal’s wife all tried to convince her that she was safe, her passport was in her bag, and she could and should leave whenever she wanted.

“The way she can create her own reality reminds me of my dad.” (Let that sink in.)

Elon was attracted to Amber was part of a pattern. “It’s really sad that he falls in love with these people who are really mean to him,” Kimbal says. “They’re beautiful, no question, but they have a very dark side and Elon knows that they’re toxic.” So why does he do it? When I ask Elon, he lets out his large laugh. “Because I’m just a fool for love,” he says. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”

Antonio Gracias was on the trip and asked if he should leave as well. “Elon put his hand on my leg and said, ‘please stay,’ ” Gracias recalls. “It was the only time I had ever seen Elon’s hands shaking.” When Errol walked into the restaurant, he loudly praised Elon for how beautiful Natasha was, which made everyone uncomfortable. “Elon and Kimbal were totally shut down, silent,” Christiana says. After an hour, they said it was time to leave.

Later in 2016, not long after Elon left, Errol got Jana, then thirty, pregnant. “We were lonely, lost people,” Errol later said. “One thing led to another—you can call it God’s plan or nature’s plan.” When Elon and his siblings found out, they were creeped out and furious. “I was actually slowly making amends with my father,” Kimbal says, “but then he had a child with Jana and I said, ‘You’re done, you’re out. I never want to speak to you again.’ And I haven’t spoken to him since.”

“He was such a terrible human being,” Musk said, starting to cry. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” In his profile, Strauss noted that Musk would not go into specifics. “There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words.”

McNeill went over and lay down next to him in the corner. “Hey, pal,” McNeill said. “We’ve got an earnings call to do.” “I can’t do it,” Musk said. “You have to,” McNeill replied. It took McNeill a half-hour to get him moving. “He came from a comatose state to a place where we could actually get him in the chair, get other people in the room, get him through his opening statement, and then cover for him,” McNeill recalls. Once it was over, Musk said, “I’ve got to lay down, I’ve got to shut off the lights. I just need some time alone.” McNeill said the same scene played out five or six times, including once when he had to lie on the conference room floor next to Musk to get his approval for a new website design.

Model 3 Hell

Tesla held a raucous event at the Fremont factory to celebrate. Before going onstage, he was scheduled to go into a small room and take questions from a handful of journalists. But something was wrong. He had been in a morbid mood all day, belting down a couple of Red Bulls to keep himself going, then trying to meditate, something he never had seriously done before. Franz von Holzhausen and JB Straubel tried to break him out of his stupor with a pep talk. But Musk seemed unresponsive, blank-faced, depressed.

“Frankly we’re going to be in production hell.” Then he started giggling maniacally. “Welcome! Welcome! Welcome to production hell! That’s where we are going to be for at least six months.” That prospect, like all hellish dramas, seemed to fill him with dark energy. “I look forward to working alongside you journeying through hell,” he told his startled audience. “As the saying goes, if you’re going through hell, just keep going.” He was. And he did.

In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally. And he did so after the July 2017 event marking the beginning of Model 3 production.

He had done the calculations of the company’s costs, overhead, and cash flow. If it hit that rate, Tesla would survive. If not, it would run out of money. He repeated that like a mantra to every executive, and he installed monitors at the factory showing the up-to-the-minute output of cars and components.

Reaching five thousand cars per week would be a huge challenge. By the end of 2017, Tesla was making cars at only half that rate. Musk decided he had to move himself, literally, to the factory floors and lead an all-in surge.

The person who designed the line there told Musk that making five thousand battery packs a week was insane. At most they could make eighteen hundred. “If you’re right, Tesla is dead,” Musk told him. “We either have five thousand cars a week or we can’t cover our costs.”

“It was a frenzy of insanity,” he says. “We were getting four or five hours’ sleep, often on the floor. I remember thinking, ‘I’m like on the ragged edge of sanity.’ ” His colleagues agreed.

“When we got too exhausted, we’d go crash at the motel for four hours, then head back,” Juncosa says.

The robot’s suction cups kept dropping the strip and it applied too much glue. “I realized that the first error was trying to automate the process, which was my fault because I pushed for a lot of automation,” he says. After much frustration, Musk finally asked a basic question: “What the hell are these strips for?”

The engineering team told him that it had been specified by the noise reduction team to cut down on vibration. So he called the noise reduction team, which told him that the specification came from the engineering team to reduce the risk of fire. “It was like being in a Dilbert cartoon,” Musk says. So he ordered them to record the sound inside a car without the fiberglass and then with the fiberglass. “See if you can tell the difference,” he told them. They couldn’t. “Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.”

…when the battery packs were completed in Nevada, little plastic caps were put on the prongs that would plug it into the car. When the battery got to the Fremont car-assembly factory, the plastic caps were removed and discarded. Sometimes, they would run out of caps in Nevada and have to hold up shipment of the batteries. When Musk asked why the caps existed, he was told they had been specified to make sure the pins did not get bent. “Who specified that requirement?” he asked. The factory team scrambled to find out, but they weren’t able to come up with a name. “So delete them,” Musk said. They did, and it turned out they never had a problem with bent pins.

“When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” says Jon McNeill. “Gage’s story was fairly typical of his behavior where he just couldn’t really process his frustration in a productive way.”

The machine had a problem gripping the material and getting aligned. Watkins and Gracias went over to a table and tried to do the process by hand. They could do it more reliably. They called Musk over and calculated how many humans it would take to get rid of the machine. Workers were hired to replace the robot, and the assembly line moved more quickly. Musk flipped from being an apostle of automation to a new mission he pursued with similar zeal: find any part of the line where there was a holdup and see if de-automation would make it go faster. “We began sawing robots out of the production line and throwing them into the parking lot,” Straubel says.

Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.

By April 2018, the Nevada factory was working better. The weather had warmed up a bit, so Musk decided he would sleep on the factory roof instead of driving to a motel. His assistant bought a few tents, and his friend Bill Lee and Sam Teller joined him.

Musk put a stake in the ground by telling all managers to order enough parts and materials to make that number. These had to be paid for, but if they were not turned into finished cars, Tesla would have cash-flow problems that would lead to a death spiral.

…skepticism about Musk’s five-thousand-cars-per-week pledge, made Tesla stock a magnet for short-sellers, who make money if the stock price falls. By 2018, Tesla had become the most shorted stock in history.

He believed that short-sellers were not merely skeptics but evil: “They are leeches on the neck of business.” The short-sellers publicly attacked Tesla and Musk personally. He would scroll through his Twitter feed seething about the false information. Even worse was the true information.

Musk made the opposite bet. The Tesla board granted him the boldest pay package in American history, one that would pay him nothing if the stock price did not rise dramatically but that had the potential to pay out $100 billion or more if the company achieved an extraordinarily aggressive set of targets, including a leap in the production numbers, revenue, and stock price. There was widespread skepticism that he could reach the targets.

At 2:30 a.m., he was with the night shift underneath a car being moved on a rack watching bolts being installed.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2018, he prowled the factory floor, like he had in Nevada, making decisions on the fly. “Elon was going completely apeshit, marching from station to station,” says Juncosa. Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”

The robotic arms tightening the bolts were, Musk thought, moving too slowly. “Even I could do it faster,” he said. He told the workers to see what the settings were for the bolt drivers. But nobody knew how to open the control console. “Okay,” he said, “I’m just going to just stand here until we find someone who can bring up that console.” Finally a technician was found who knew how to access the robot’s controls. Musk discovered that the robot was set to 20 percent of its maximum speed and that the default settings instructed the arm to turn the bolt backward twice before spinning it forward to tighten. “Factory settings are always idiotic,” he said.

…in a flood, if the water is higher than the floorboards, the butyl patches help prevent the floor from getting too wet. “That’s insane,” Musk responded. “Once in ten years there will be such a flood. When it happens, the floor mats can get wet.” The patches were deleted.

The New York Times reported that workers felt pressure to work ten-hour days. “It’s a constant ‘How many cars have we built so far?’—a constant pressure to build,” one worker told the paper.

After the de-automation and other improvements, the juiced-up Fremont plant was churning out thirty-five hundred Model 3 sedans per week by late May 2018.

There was a provision in the Fremont zoning code for something called “a temporary vehicle repair facility.” It was intended to allow gas stations to set up tents where they could change tires or mufflers. But the regulations did not specify a maximum size. “Get one of those permits and start building a huge tent,” he told Guillen. “We’ll have to pay a fine later.”

In two weeks, they were able to complete a tented facility that was 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide, big enough to accommodate a makeshift assembly line. Instead of robots, there were humans at each station.

…just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makeshift tent.

“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.”

At 1:53 a.m. on Sunday, July 1, a black Model 3 was disgorged from the factory with a paper banner across its windshield reading “5000th.”

At any given production meeting, whether at Tesla or SpaceX, there is a nontrivial chance that Musk will intone, like a mantra, what he calls “the algorithm.” It was shaped by the lessons he learned during the production hell surges at the Nevada and Fremont factories. His executives sometimes move their lips and mouth the words, like they would chant the liturgy along with their priest. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk says. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.”

Twitter & 420

Once again, if Musk had then been content to leave bad enough alone, things may have ended there. But in August he responded to a Twitter user who chided him over calling Unsworth a pedo by saying, “You don’t think it’s strange he hasn’t sued me? He was offered free legal services.” Even one of his biggest fans on Twitter, Johnna Crider, advised him, “Yo Elon, don’t feed into the drama bro thats what they want.”

“He was kind of losing it,” says Joe Fath of T. Rowe Price, who telephoned after the pedo tweets. “This stuff has got to stop,” he told Musk, comparing his behavior to that of Lindsay Lohan, an actress who around that time was spinning out of control. “You’re doing major damage to the brand.” Their talk lasted for forty-five minutes, and Musk seemed to listen. But his destructive behavior continued.

Musk’s friends began referring to his crises as his going “open-loop.” The term is used for an object, such as a bullet as opposed to a guided missile, that has no feedback mechanism to provide it with guidance. “Whenever our friends become open-loop, meaning that they don’t have iterative feedback and don’t seem to care about the outcomes, we take it upon ourselves to let each other know,” Kimbal says. So after the pedo-tweet situation escalated, Kimbal said to his brother, “Okay, open-loop warning.” It was a phrase he would use four years later when Musk was dealing with his purchase of Twitter.

Musk and the fund’s leader, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, discussed the possibility of taking Tesla private. The notion appealed to Musk. He hated having the value of the company determined by speculators and short-sellers, and he chafed at the regulations that came with being traded on a stock exchange.

His original calculation set the price at $419, but he liked the number 420 because it was slang for smoking marijuana. “It seemed like better karma at four-twenty than at four-nineteen,” he says. “But I was not on weed, to be clear. Weed is not helpful for productivity. There’s a reason for the word ‘stoned.’ ” He later admitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that choosing a price as a dope joke was not a wise move.

…he unleashed a fateful tweet. “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The stock shot up 7 percent before stock exchange officials temporarily halted trading. One rule for public companies is that executives must warn the stock exchange ten minutes before any announcement that might cause market volatility. Musk did not pay attention to rules. The SEC promptly opened an investigation. The board and top management at Tesla were caught off guard. When the company’s head of investor relations saw Musk’s tweet, he texted Teller, asking, “Was this text legit?” Gracias called Musk to officially express the board’s concern and ask him to stop tweeting until the matter had been discussed.

…the Saudis were expressing discomfort that their discussions about taking Tesla private had been inflated into a “funding secured” tweet.

The blowback was brutal. “This is classic, extreme bipolar behavior risk-taking,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on air. “I’m talking about behavior that is obviously being examined by many psychiatrists who are saying classic risk-taking, this is not what a CEO should be doing.”

Gracias, and Tesla’s CFO Deepak Ahuja pushed hard for him to accept these terms and put the controversy—and perhaps his months of meltdown—behind him. But Musk surprised them by abruptly rejecting the proposed deal. On the night of September 26, the SEC filed a lawsuit seeking to ban him for life from running Tesla or any other public company.

His hot-shot lawyer Alex Spiro argued to the jury, “Elon Musk is just an impulsive kid with a terrible Twitter habit.” It was an effective defense strategy that had the added virtue of being true.

Musk may not have broken state law, but in addition to further rattling investors, he appeared to have broken federal regulations, leading to an investigation by NASA.

Side Ventures

Davis, who ran The Boring Company, found a relatively safe prototype that could melt snow and singe weeds but was technically not hot enough to be regulated as a flamethrower. They began marketing it, tongue in cheek, as “not a flamethrower” to avoid running afoul of the law.

They priced it at $500 (it now goes for twice that on eBay) and within four days had sold out twenty thousand of them, grossing $10 million.

“I had my finance guy look at it, and the restaurants are struggling. I think they should die.” “What did you just say?” Kimbal yelled. “Fuck you. Fuck you! This is not how it works.” He reminded Elon, forcefully, that when Tesla’s finances were struggling, he had come to work by his brother’s side and provided him financing. “If you would’ve looked at Tesla finance, it should have died as well,” Kimbal said. “So this is not how this works.” Elon eventually relented. “I basically strong-armed him into putting in five million,” says Kimbal. The restaurants survived. But the incident nevertheless caused a rupture.

After six weeks of silence, Kimbal reached out to heal the rift. “I decided to go back to being Elon’s brother because I didn’t want to lose him,” he says. “I missed my brother.” I asked how Elon reacted when he reached out to him. “He responded as if nothing had happened,” Kimbal said. “That’s how Elon is.”

“It was becoming absolutely exhausting for me,” he says. He went to Musk in January 2018, urged him to get psychological help, and said, “I love you, but I can’t do this anymore.”

“He was struggling, and that made him more mercurial than even the normal,” Straubel says. “I felt terrible for him and tried to help him as a friend, but couldn’t really.” Musk is usually not sentimental about people leaving. He likes fresh blood. He is more concerned with a phenomenon he calls “phoning in rich,” meaning people who have worked at the company for a long time and, because they have enough money and vacation homes, no longer hunger to stay all night on the factory floor. But in the case of Straubel, Musk felt a personal affection as well as professional trust. “I was a little surprised at Elon’s reluctance to have me leave,” says Straubel.

Musk’s respect for him endured. In 2023, he would invite Straubel to join the board of Tesla.

Grimes & China

They had met before and, ironically, it was when Musk was in an elevator with Amber Heard. “Remember that elevator meeting?” Grimes asked during a late-night conversation I had with her and Musk. “I mean that was super weird.”

At the restaurant, he carved “EM+CB” on the wall. When she compared his powers to those of Gandalf, he gave her a rapid-fire trivia test on Lord of the Rings. He wanted to see whether she was truly a faithful fan. She passed. “That mattered to me,” Musk says. As a gift, she gave him a box of animal bones she had collected. In the evenings, they listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and other history podcasts and audiobooks. “The only way I could be in a serious relationship is if the person I’m dating can also listen to an hour of, like, war history before bed,” she says.

Grimes was not a calming influence. The intensity that made her an edgy artist brought with it a messy lifestyle. She stayed up most of the night and slept most of the day. She was demanding and distrustful of Musk’s household staff, and she had a difficult relationship with his mother. Musk was a drama addict, and Grimes had a companion trait: she was a drama magnet.

…in order to succeed in selling cars in China, Tesla would have to manufacture cars there. According to Chinese law, that would require forming a joint venture with a Chinese company. Musk was allergic to joint ventures. He didn’t share control well.

Ren’s big challenge was to find a way to do manufacturing in China. He could either wear down Musk’s resistance and have Tesla form a joint venture, which is what every other car company had done, or he could convince China’s top leaders to change a law that had defined Chinese manufacturing growth for three decades. He discovered that the latter was easier.

China finally agreed in early 2018 to let Tesla build a factory without having to enter into a joint venture. Ren and his team were able to negotiate a deal for more than two hundred acres near Shanghai along with low-interest loans.

Ren started to go through a slide deck with maps, financing commitments, and deal terms, but Musk did not look at them. Instead, he stared out of the window of his plane for almost a full minute. Then he looked Ren directly in the eye. “Do you believe this is the right thing?” Ren was so taken aback that he paused for a few seconds before saying yes. “Okay, let’s do it,” Musk said and left the plane.

Within two years, China would be making more than half of Tesla’s vehicles.

Future Design

His son Saxon, who is autistic, had recently asked an offbeat question that resonated: “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?” Musk would quote Saxon’s question repeatedly. As he said to the design team that Friday, “I want the future to look like the future.” There were a few dissenting voices suggesting that something too futuristic would not sell. After all, this was a pickup truck. “I don’t care if no one buys it,” he said at the end of the session. “We’re not doing a traditional boring truck. We can always do that later. I want to build something that’s cool.

When some designers pushed him to at least do some market testing, Musk replied, “I don’t do focus groups.”

…he took Grimes for a spin in the prototype to Nobu restaurant, where the valet parkers just stared at it without touching. On the way out, pursued by paparazzi, he drove over a pylon in the parking lot with a “No Left Turn” sign and turned left.

“Internet revenue is about one trillion dollars a year,” he says. “If we can serve three percent, that’s $30 billion, which is more than NASA’s budget. That was the inspiration for Starlink, to fund getting to Mars.” He pauses, then adds for emphasis, “The lens of getting to Mars has motivated every SpaceX decision.”

Musk was having a Spidey sense that something was amiss at Starlink. Its satellites were too big, expensive, and difficult to manufacture. In order to reach a profitable scale, they would have to be made at one-tenth the cost and ten times faster. But the Starlink team did not seem to feel much urgency, a cardinal sin for Musk. So one Sunday night that June, without much warning, he flew to Seattle to fire the entire top Starlink team. He brought with him eight of his most senior SpaceX rocket engineers. None knew much about satellites, but they all knew how to solve engineering problems and apply Musk’s algorithm.

…the satellite’s antennas were on a separate structure from the flight computer. The engineers had decreed that they be thermally isolated from one another. Juncosa kept asking why. When told that the antennas might overheat, Juncosa asked to see the test data. “By the time that I asked ‘Why?’ five times,” Juncosa says, “people were like, ‘Shit, maybe we should just make this one integrated component.’ ” By the end of the design process, Juncosa had turned a rat’s nest into what was now a simple flat satellite. It had the potential to be an order of magnitude cheaper.

At the end of his walk around the facility, he got very quiet and stared at the ships coming into the port. “Guys, we’ve got to change course,” he said. “We are never going to build rockets fast enough with this process. What about going with stainless steel?”

…they argued that a rocket of stainless steel would likely be heavier than one built of carbon fiber or the aluminum-lithium alloy used for the Falcon 9. Musk’s instincts said otherwise. “Run the numbers,” he told the team. “Run the numbers.” When they did so, they determined that steel could, in fact, turn out to be lighter in the conditions that Starship would face. At very cold temperatures, the strength of stainless steel increases by 50 percent, which meant it would be stronger when holding the supercooled liquid oxygen fuel. In addition, the high melting point of stainless steel would eliminate the need for a heat shield on Starship’s space-facing side, reducing the overall weight of the rocket.

The switch to stainless steel allowed SpaceX to hire builders without the specialized expertise needed for fabricating carbon fiber.

“One of Elon’s rules is ‘Go as close to the source as possible for information,’ ” Riley says. The line workers said they thought the tank walls could get as thin as 4.8 millimeters. “What about four?” Musk asked. “That would make us pretty nervous,” one of the workers replied. “Okay,” Musk said, “let’s do four millimeters. Let’s give it a try.” It worked.

She had the standing to get away with such a challenge. “Once I gave Elon the context, he agreed we couldn’t do what he wanted,” she says. One problem Musk had was that most people around him were afraid to do that.

A shed in the backyard is sometimes used by Grimes as a studio or by Maye Musk as a bedroom. Humble does not begin to describe its status as the primary residence of a billionaire. But Musk found it to be a haven. After long meetings at Starbase or tense inspection tours of the rocket assembly lines, he would drive himself back there and his body would relax as he puttered around the house, whistling like a suburban dad.

“Every couple hours I would wake up, and he was just still sitting there, in the thinking man statue pose, just completely silent on the edge of the bed,” Grimes says. When she woke up that morning, he said to her, “I solved it.”

Autopilot Crunch

Musk’s Autopilot surge not only drove his team crazy; it drove him crazy as well. “He had to divorce himself from reality in order to get out of a shitty situation when he thought disaster was imminent,” says Shivon Zilis, the close friend he had recruited to help with artificial intelligence projects. “He once asked me to tell him if he’d ever gone bananas. This was the only time I’ve ever walked in the room, looked at him, and said the word ‘bananas.’ This was the first time he saw me cry.”

As often happened when he went into crisis mode, he wanted to clean house and fire people, even in the midst of a surge. He decided he needed to get rid of all the top managers of the Autopilot team, but Omead Afshar intervened to convince him to at least wait until after Autonomy Day.

The skepticism was warranted. A year later—indeed, four years later—there would not be a million Tesla Robotaxis, or even one of them, driving autonomously on city streets.

California had become too fraught with NIMBYism, clogged with regulations, plagued by meddlesome commissions, and too skittish about COVID.

Dallas? Texas was alluring, but Dallas, they agreed, was too Texas.

The process reinforced Musk’s appreciation for the toy industry. “They have to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws, and manufacture them all by Christmas, or there will be sad faces.” He repeatedly pushed his teams to get ideas from toys, such as robots and Legos. As he walked the floor of the factory, he spoke to a group of machinists about the high-precision molding of Lego pieces. They are accurate and identical to within ten microns, which means any part can easily be replaced by another. Car components needed to be that way. “Precision is not expensive,” he says. “It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.”

The A-12, which had to be spelled A-Xii on the birth certificate because California does not permit numerals in a name, was Musk’s contribution, a reference to a great-looking spy plane known as the Archangel.

Xavier was strong-willed and developed a deep hatred for capitalism and wealth. There were long and bitter exchanges, in person and by text, in which Xavier repeatedly said, “I hate you and everything you stand for.” It was one factor that made Musk decide to sell his houses and live less lavishly, but that had little effect on the relationship. By 2020, the rift had become irreparable.

Xavier and Elon were already estranged when the sixteen-year-old decided to transition to female around the time X was born.

The rift with Jenna, she says, was caused more by her radical Marxism than her gender identity. Christiana speaks from some experience. She was at times estranged from her own billionaire father…

His disagreements with Jenna, Musk says, “became intense when she went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil.”

SpaceX Leadership

When NASA had awarded SpaceX the contract to build a rocket that would take astronauts to the Space Station, it had, on the same day in 2014, given a competing contract, with 40 percent more funding, to Boeing. By the time SpaceX succeeded in 2020, Boeing had not even been able to get an unmanned test flight to dock with the station.

“I will never forget walking the floor that day,” he says. “All the young engineers working their asses off and wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos and being really badass about getting things done. I thought, ‘These are my people.’ It was nothing like the buttoned-up deadly vibe at Boeing.” That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit.

He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

Dontchev then made a smart request. He said he wanted to report to Morris rather than directly to Musk. The result was a smooth-running team led by a manager who knew how to be a Yoda-like mentor and an engineer who was eager to match Musk’s intensity.

Nobody from the FAA was actually in the control room, and it was slightly (though not very) unclear what the rules were, so the launch director turned to Elon and silently cocked his head as if asking if he should proceed. Musk gave a silent nod. The rocket took off. “It was all very subtle,” says Koenigsmann. “That’s typical Elon. A decision to take a risk signaled by a nod of the head.” The rocket launched perfectly, without the weather being a problem…

“The FAA is both incompetent and conservative, which is a bad mixture, but I still needed a sign-off from them before we should have flown, and we did not have that,” he told me. “Elon had launched when the FAA said we couldn’t. So I wrote a true report that said that.” He wanted SpaceX, and Musk, to accept blame. That was not the attitude that Musk valued. “He didn’t see it that way, and got touchy, very touchy,” Koenigsmann says.

“You did an awesome job over many years, but eventually everybody’s time comes to retire,” Musk told him in an email. “Yours is now.”

Bezos and Musk were alike in some respects. They both disrupted industries through passion, innovation, and force of will. They were both abrupt with employees, quick to call things stupid, and enraged by doubters and naysayers. And they both focused on envisioning the future rather than pursuing short-term profits. When asked if he even knew how to spell “profit,” Bezos answered, “P-r-o-p-h-e-t.”

Bezos was skeptical, indeed dismissive of Musk’s practice of spending hours at engineering meetings making technical suggestions and issuing abrupt orders.

Musk felt that Bezos was a dilettante whose lack of focus on the engineering was one reason Blue Origin had made less progress than SpaceX.

That would put them close to the planned orbits of Bezos’s competing Kuiper constellation, so Bezos filed an objection. Once again, Musk attacked him on Twitter, misspelling his name, intentionally, as the Spanish word for “kisses”: “Turns out Besos retired to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX.” The FCC ruled that Musk’s plans could proceed.

“He doesn’t seem to sleep much,” Branson says.

Bezos’s mission nine days later also succeeded. Musk, of course, did not attend that one.

“If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can’t launch the next rocket for a long time,” Bill Riley says. “But we agreed to study different ways to do it.” A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex.

“Why is no one working?” Musk demanded. Unfortunately for Krebs, it was the first time in three weeks he didn’t have a full night shift working on the tower and launchpad.

“How can you fucking not know what the best and worst parts are?” “I know the cost chart down to the smallest part,” Hughes said quietly. “I just don’t know the cost of the raw materials of those parts.” “What are the worst five parts?” Musk demanded. Hughes looked at his computer to see if he could calculate an answer. “NO! Don’t look at your screen,” Musk said. “Just name one. You should know the problematic parts.” “There’s the half nozzle jacket,” Hughes offered tentatively. “I think it costs thirteen thousand dollars.” “It’s made of a single piece of steel,” Musk said, now quizzing him. “How much does that material cost?” “I think a few thousand dollars?” replied Hughes. Musk knew the answer. “No. It’s just steel. It’s about two hundred bucks.

I pulled Shotwell aside and asked for her assessment of how Musk had treated Hughes. She cares about the human dimension that Musk ignores. She lowered her voice. “I heard that Lucas lost his first child about seven weeks ago,” she said. “He and his wife had a baby with birth problems who was never able to leave the hospital.” That was why, she felt, Hughes had been flustered and less prepared than usual.

“He was correct about what the materials cost, and I couldn’t figure out a way in the moment to explain the other costs in a way that was successful.”

Tesla Energy

“I fucking hate my cousins,” he told Kunal Girotra, one of the four chiefs of Tesla Energy he hired and fired over the subsequent five years. “I don’t think I ever will ever speak to them again.”

“You have two weeks to fix this. I fired my cousins and I’ll fire you if you don’t get installations going ten times faster.” Johnson didn’t.

The business of installing solar roofs is labor-intensive and doesn’t scale. Musk was a master at designing factories that could bring down the cost of physical products by churning them out in ever-increasing volumes, but the cost of each roof installation is pretty much the same whether you do ten a month or a hundred. Musk did not have the patience for such businesses.

“Thank you for trying,” Musk finally said. “But this isn’t cutting it.” It took Dow a while to realize that Musk was firing him. “It was just the most bizarre, weird firing you could imagine,” Dow later says. “I had so much history with him, and deep down Elon knows that I have something special. He knows that I can kick ass, because we’d done it together in the past, in the Nevada battery factory. But he thought I was losing my edge, even though I had missed my birthday with my family to be up on that roof with him.” After Dow left, Musk was still not able to make the numbers work. A year later, Tesla Energy was installing only about thirty roofs per week, nowhere close to the one thousand that Musk kept demanding.

…when he reached the milestone of turning fifty on June 28, 2021, he had just undergone a third neck surgery to ease the pain from the injury that happened when he tried to take down a sumo wrestler at his forty-second birthday party.

For much of his birthday weekend, his friends left him alone so that he could sleep.

…they all went to his tiny house and gathered in the even tinier backyard studio cottage where Grimes worked. It was furnished only with big floor pillows, and they hung around—Musk lying flat on the floor with a pillow behind his neck—and talked until sunrise.

His romances often involved an unhealthy dose of mutual meanness, and the one with Grimes was no exception. Sometimes he would seem to thrive on the tension, demanding that Grimes do such things as shame him for being fat.

“Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he said. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.” Fifty years earlier, America had sent men to the moon. But since then, there had been no progress. Just the reverse. The Space Shuttle could only do low-Earth orbit, and after it was retired, America couldn’t even do that anymore. “Technology does not automatically progress,” Musk said. “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

He admitted there was a reasonable chance that it would not work, but it was better to try and fail rather than analyze the issue for months. “If you make this thing fast, you can find out fast. And then you can fix it fast.” He eventually succeeded in converting most of the parts into stainless steel.

After the meeting, he stayed behind in the conference room. His neck was hurting from his old Sumo wrestling accident, and he lay on the floor with an ice pack behind his head.

…engineers went through the usual stages of post-Musk distress disorder: baffled, then angry, then anxious. But within a week they got to the stage of being intrigued, because the new approach, they realized, might actually work. When Musk returned to the lab a few weeks later, they showed him a single chip that could handle the processing of data from all the threads and transmit it by Bluetooth to a computer. No connections, no router, no wires. “We thought this was impossible,” one of the engineers said, “but now we’re actually pretty stoked by it.”

One problem they faced was caused by the requirement that the chip be very small. That made it a challenge for it to have a long battery life and support many threads. “Why does it have to be so small?” Musk asked. Someone made the mistake of saying that it was one of the requirements they had been given. This flipped on the switch for Musk to intone his algorithm, beginning with questioning every requirement.

A meeting was scheduled for the entire team to debate the issue and make a decision. After all the arguments were aired, Musk paused for about forty seconds. “I’m pulling the plug,” he finally said. “Delete radar.” Guillen continued to push back, and Musk got coldly angry. “If you won’t remove it,” he said, “I will get someone else who will.”

Although stubborn, Musk can be brought around by evidence.

He had sold all of his houses because he believed that he should not be criticized if he kept his wealth deployed in his companies rather than spending it on his lifestyle. But he continued to be criticized because, by taking no salary and leaving his money invested in the company, he did not reap any capital gains and paid little tax. In November 2021, he conducted a Twitter poll to see if he should sell some Tesla stock in order to realize some of the capital gains and pay tax on it. There were 3.5 million votes, with 58 percent voting yes. As he already was planning to do, he exercised options that he had been granted in 2012 and were due to expire, which caused him to pay the largest single tax bill in history: $11 billion, enough to fund the entire budget of his antagonists at the Securities and Exchange Commission for five years.

…his mood swings and depression were manifest as stomach pains. He was throwing up and had intense heartburn.

This was an essential insight that Musk had about himself. When things were most dire, he got energized. It was the siege mentality from his South African childhood. But when he was not in survival-or-die mode, he felt unsettled. What should have been the good times were unnerving for him. It prompted him to launch surges, stir up dramas, throw himself into battles he could have bypassed, and bite off new endeavors.

Crisis & Politics

…abruptly, he announced that he had to fly back to Los Angeles to deal with the Raptor crisis. It was a crisis that mainly existed in his mind. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and the Raptor was not even expected to be ready for at least another year.

That led to an improbably weird and potentially awkward situation worthy of a new-age French farce. When Zilis was in the Austin hospital with complications from her pregnancy, so too was the surrogate mother carrying the baby girl that Musk and Grimes had secretly conceived in vitro. Because the surrogate mother was having a troubled pregnancy, Grimes was staying with her. She was unaware that Zilis was in a nearby room, or that she was pregnant by Musk. Perhaps it is no surprise that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving weekend to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.

At first they called her Sailor Mars, after one of the heroines in the Sailor Moon manga, which features female warriors who protect the solar system from evil. It seemed a fitting though not exactly conventional name for a child who might be destined to go to Mars. By April, they decided they needed to give her a less serious name (yes), because “she’s all sparkly and a lot goofier troll,” Grimes said.

“I will be on the line with everyone else,” he tweeted. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

…the factory experienced no serious COVID outbreak. The controversy became a factor in his political evolution. He went from being a fanboy and fundraiser for Barack Obama to railing against progressive Democrats.

His disdain for Biden grew in August 2021 when the president held an event at the White House to celebrate electric vehicles. The heads of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, along with the leader of the United Auto Workers union, were invited, but not Musk, even though Tesla sold far more electric cars in the U.S. than all other companies combined.

Biden’s staffers, many of whom drove Teslas, became concerned about the growing rift…

During one game when they had agreed to be a united front against other tribes, she surprise-attacked him with a flame ball. “It was one of our biggest fights ever,” she remembers. “He took it as this deep betrayal moment.” Grimes protested it was only a video game and not a big deal. “It’s a huge fucking deal,” he told her. He did not speak to her for the rest of the day.

On a visit to Tesla’s Berlin factory, he got so wrapped up in Polytopia that he delayed meetings with the local managers. His mother, who was on the trip, scolded him.

Starlink & War

Every day that week, Musk held regular meetings with the Starlink engineers. Unlike every other company and even parts of the U.S. military, they were able to find ways to defeat Russian jamming.

Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

Other companies, including big and profitable defense contractors, were charging billions to supply weapons to Ukraine, so it seemed unfair that Starlink, which was not yet profitable, should do it for free. “We initially gave the Ukrainians free service for humanitarian and defense purposes, such as keeping up their hospitals and banking systems,” she says. “But then they started putting them on fucking drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers. That’s what companies and people should do. But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.”

“The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” Shotwell thought that was ridiculous. “The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally. Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”

That led to an amazingly candid secret encrypted exchange…

Gates & Power

They’d had friendly interactions a few times in the past, including when Gates brought his son Rory to SpaceX. Musk, who had always liked the Microsoft operating system more than most other techies did, could relate to a guy who had built a company by being hardcore and relentless.

Gates, who thought it was “bizarre” that Musk had no scheduler, felt weird having one of his assistants call Musk, so he did so directly and arranged a time they could meet in Austin.

Musk and Gates have some similarities. Both have analytic minds, an ability to laser-focus, and an intellectual surety that edges into arrogance. Neither suffers fools.

Gates had shorted Tesla stock, placing a big bet that it would go down in value. He turned out to be wrong. By the time he arrived in Austin, he had lost $1.5 billion. Musk had heard about it and was seething. Short-sellers occupied his innermost circle of hell. Gates said he was sorry, but that did not placate Musk. “I apologized to him,” Gates says. “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.”

Grimes added her own interpretation: “I imagine it’s a little bit of a dick-measuring contest.”

Musk responded by text with a simple question: “Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?” Gates was sitting in the dining room of the Four Seasons hotel in Washington, DC, with his son Rory, who was just starting graduate school. He laughed, showed Rory the text, and asked for his advice on how to answer. “Just say yes, and then change the subject quickly,” Rory suggested. Gates tried that. “Sorry to say I haven’t closed it out,” he texted back. “I would like to discuss philanthropy possibilities.” It didn’t work. “Sorry,” Musk shot back instantly. “I cannot take your philanthropy on climate seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.”

Gates was truly puzzled about why Musk was upset that he shorted the stock. And Musk was just as puzzled that Gates could find it puzzling.

Musk found Agrawal to be likable. “He’s a really nice guy,” he says. But that was the problem. If you ask Musk what are the traits needed in a CEO, he would not include “being a really nice guy.” One of his maxims is that managers should not aim to be liked. “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon,” he said after that meeting, “and Parag is not that.”

Musk liked the fact that Agrawal was an engineer, not a typical CEO. “I interface way better with engineers who are able to do hardcore programming than with program manager/MBA types of people,” he texted. “I love our conversations!” “In our next convo, treat me like an engineer instead of CEO and let’s see where we get to,” Agrawal replied.

Twitter Intent

Despite sharing Musk’s libertarian views on free speech, Howery pushed back gently with some sophisticated thoughts, posed as gentle questions.

He was frustrated by his talks with members of the Twitter board. “They’re nice, but none of them use Twitter,” he said. “I don’t feel like anything will happen.”

“Instead of sleeping,” Grimes said, “he played until five-thirty in the morning.”

Farooq asked the question that many of Musk’s friends had about Twitter: “Why are you doing this?”

“What about your time and sanity?” he asked. “Tesla and SpaceX still need your help. How long would it take to turn Twitter around?” “At least five years,” Musk answered. “I would have to get rid of much of the staff. They don’t work hard or even show up.” “Do you want to go through all that pain?” Farooq asked. “You slept on the factory floor for Tesla, doubled down for SpaceX. Do you really want to take all this on again?” Musk did one of his very long pauses. “Yes, I actually would,” he finally said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“We have to match the functionality of WeChat,” he told me after a call with bankers in April. “One of the most important things will be enabling people who create content to get paid on Twitter.” An online payment system would have the added benefit of authenticating users. Twitter would be able to verify which users were real humans by requiring them to pay a small monthly fee and having their credit card information.

Bankman-Fried “would do the engineering for social media blockchain integration” and put $5 billion in the deal. He was available to fly to Austin the next day, if Musk was willing to meet with him. Musk had discussed with Kimbal and others the possibility of using the blockchain as a backbone for Twitter. But despite the fun he had with Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies, he was not a blockchain acolyte, and he felt it would be too sluggish to support fast-paced Twitter postings. So he had no desire to meet with Bankman-Fried.

He said he might at some point meet with Bankman-Fried, “so long as I don’t have to have a laborious blockchain debate.” Bankman-Fried then texted Musk directly to say he was “really excited about what you’ll do with TWTR.” He said he had $100 million of Twitter stock that he’d like to “roll,” meaning that his Twitter stock would be converted into a stake in the new company once Musk took it private. “Sorry, who is sending this message?” Musk texted back. When Bankman-Fried apologized and introduced himself, Musk replied curtly, “You’re welcome to roll.” That led Bankman-Fried to call Musk in May. “My bullshit detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter,” Musk says. Bankman-Fried began talking rapidly, all about himself. “He was talking like he was on speed or Adderall, a mile a minute,” Musk says. “I thought he was supposed to be asking me questions about the deal, but he kept telling me the things he was doing. And I was thinking, ‘Dude, calm down.’ ” The feeling was mutual; Bankman-Fried thought Musk seemed nuts. The call lasted a half-hour, and Bankman-Fried ended up neither investing nor rolling over his Twitter stock.

“How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” It was a joke. But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell, even for his kids. Maybe even for himself. They were aghast. He reassured them that he was just kidding.

He felt strongly that he had overpaid, which was true. Advertising spending was down in the summer of 2022…

As his father had taught him when they visited amusement parks in Florida, a Coke that costs too much does not taste as good.

Twitter Deal

Spiro, his lawyer, desperately urged him to walk back the declaration. It might be possible to wriggle out of the deal, they told him, but it was legally perilous for him to be announcing his desire to do so. Two hours later, Musk posted a four-word addendum: “Still committed to acquisition.”

Without consulting his lawyers, Musk agreed to attend a virtual town hall meeting with Twitter employees on June 16. “It was one of those examples of Elon just being Elon and accepting an invitation without talking to any of us or getting prepped,” Birchall says.

…initially had trouble getting into the virtual conference because it was held on Google Meet, and he didn’t have a Google account on his laptop. He finally got in on his iPhone. While we were waiting, one of the meeting organizers asked, “Does anyone know who Jared Birchall is?” He was denied entry.

…the Wall Street Journal started working on a story about an alleged one-night stand that Musk had with the estranged wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin a few months earlier. The rationale for the story was that it had harmed relations between the two men. Right after the story broke, they were at a party together, and Musk maneuvered himself into a position where he could take a selfie with Brin, which Brin tried to avoid.

When the boys woke up the next day, they were upset that their father had tweeted out the picture. One of them even cried. On a group chat they do with their father, even when traveling together, one asked him to not tweet out pictures of them without their permission. Musk got depressed, dropped off the group chat, and a few minutes later sent word that they were returning to the U.S.

…he climbed down from the platform and then ran, lumbering, the two hundred yards across a parking lot to the canteen. “I think he does that so everyone can see how much he’s hustling,” Andy Krebs said. I later asked Musk if that was his reason. “No,” he laughed. “I did it because I forgot to put on sunscreen and didn’t want to get burned.”

…he brought in Bob Swan, a former CEO of eBay and Intel and a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which was investing in Musk’s offer. The problem was that Swan, a straight shooter, was committed to Plan A. He felt there was no real justification for getting out of the deal.

“If you can present this to me with a straight face, then you’re probably not the guy for the job,” he said. Swan had been too successful to be treated that way. “Since I presented this to you with a straight face, you’re right,” he responded. “I’m probably not the right guy for the job.” And he quit.

Steel had an interesting insight about Musk. When most clients are given three or four options, they will ask which one the banker recommends. Musk, instead, asked detailed questions about each option but did not solicit a recommendation. He liked to make his own decision.

Spiro was an overmatched lion tamer. Within ten minutes, Musk sent a barrage of tweets that almost seemed designed to spite his legal team. “So much for the conversation about tweeting,” Birchall told Spiro.

Musk’s negotiations with Twitter to lower the price of the deal did not get far. The company made some proposals that could have reduced the $44 billion price by about 4 percent, but Musk insisted that the reduction had to be more than 10 percent before he would consider it.

Twitter’s executives and board members insisted that any renegotiated deal must protect them from future lawsuits from Musk. “We are never going to give them a legal release,” Musk said. “We will hunt every single one of them till the day they die.”

His lawyers finally convinced him at the end of September that he would lose the case if they took it to trial. It was best just to close the deal on the original terms…

Emanuel came back to Musk, in a three-paragraph message sent on the encrypted text service Signal, with a proposal: let him and his agency Endeavor run Twitter. For a fee of $100 million, he said, he would take charge of cutting costs, creating a better culture, and managing relations with advertisers and marketers.

Birchall called it “the most insulting, demeaning, insane message.” Musk was more sanguine and polite. He valued his friendship with Emanuel. “Look, I appreciate the offer,” he said. “But Twitter is a tech company, a programming company.” Emanuel countered that they could just hire the tech people, but Musk gave him a firm no. He had a core belief that you could not separate engineering from product design. In fact, product design should be driven by engineers.

There was another thing that Emanuel did not understand. Musk wanted to run Twitter himself, just as he was doing with Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.

“Burnt hair perfume!” Musk said, imagining the marketing pitch. “Do you like that smell you experienced after the flamethrower? We have that scent for you!”

Musk tweeted, “Please buy my perfume, so I can buy Twitter.” Within a week, it sold out thirty thousand orders for $100 apiece.

Robotaxi Debate

“I worked for months without a day off and got so tired that I quit Tesla right after Autonomy Day,” he said. “I was burned out. But after nine months, I was bored, so I called my boss and begged him to let me come back. I decided I’d rather be burned out than bored.”

Zaman, who led the artificial intelligence infrastructure team, had a similar story. From northern Holland, he joined Tesla in 2019. “When you’re at Tesla, you’re afraid to go anywhere else, because you will become so bored.” He just had his first child, a daughter, and knows that Tesla is not conducive to a work-life balance. Nevertheless, he plans to stay. “I’m going to spend the next few days off with my wife and daughter,” he says, “but if I take a whole week off, my brain gets fried.”

…after Musk made his pronouncements about being “all in” on a Robotaxi with no steering wheel, von Holzhausen and Moravy set about persuading him to cover his bet. They knew how to do it in a nonchallenging way.

…he repeatedly vetoed the idea, saying that the Robotaxi would make the other car unnecessary. Nevertheless, von Holzhausen had quietly kept it alive as a shadow project in his design studio.

By 2030, there might be up to 700 million of them, almost twice as many as for the Model 3/Y category. Then they showed that the same vehicle platform and the same assembly lines could be used to make both the $25,000 car and the Robotaxi. “We convinced him that if we build these factories and we have this platform, we could churn out both Robotaxis and a $25,000 car, all on the same vehicle architecture,” von Holzhausen says. After the meeting, Musk and I sat alone in the conference room, and it was clear that he was unenthusiastic about the $25,000 car. “It’s really not that exciting of a product,” he said.

Twitter Overhaul

Musk was ready to pull the trigger immediately. If the layoffs were executed before November 1, the company would not have to pay the bonuses and option grants that were due then. But Twitter’s human resources managers pushed back. They wanted to vet the list for diversity.

“Put me in the game coach! Twitter CEO is my dream job.” His eagerness occasionally drew a brushback from Musk, such as when he created a financial special purpose vehicle to line up investments in Musk’s Twitter bid. “What is going on with you marketing an SPV to randos?” Musk texted. “This is not ok.” Calacanis apologized and backed off. “This deal has just captured the world’s imagination in an unimaginable way. It’s bonkers…. I’m ride or die brother—I’d jump on a grenade for you.”

Advertising accounted for 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue. It was already declining due to an ad recession, but after Musk took over it began to fall much faster. It would tumble by more than half in the next six months.

He thought of it as a technology company, when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships. He knew he had to be solicitous on his New York trip, but he was angry.

At each meeting, he was asked about his Paul Pelosi tweet. “I am who I am,” he said at one point, which was not actually reassuring to any of his listeners, who somehow hoped otherwise. “My Twitter account is an extension of me personally, and, like, I’m going to tweet some things that are going to be stupid, and I’m going to make mistakes.” He said it not with an aw-shucks humility but instead with a cold diffidence. On one of the Zoom calls, some of the advertisers could be seen folding their arms or signing off. “What the fuck?” one of them muttered. Twitter was supposed to be a billion-dollar business, not an extension of Elon Musk’s flaws and quirks. The next day, many of Twitter’s top executives who were trusted by the advertising community quit or were fired, most notably Leslie Berland, Jean-Philippe Maheu, and Sarah Personette. More major brands and advertising agencies announced their intention to pause Twitter advertising or just did so quietly. Sales fell 80 percent for the month.

Kissinger once quoted an aide saying that the Watergate scandal had happened “because some damn fool went into the Oval Office and did what Nixon told him to do.” Those around Musk knew how to ride out his periods of demon mode. Roth later described the encounter in a conversation with Birchall. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Birchall told him. “That happens with Elon. You need to just ignore it and don’t do what he says. Then later on, go back to him after he has processed the inputs.”

When one of the engineers tried to raise another issue, Musk shut him down. “Don’t even think about it right now,” he said. “There is only one priority: stopping the massive impersonation onslaught that’s going to happen.” One problem was that this required humans as well as lines of code. Musk had laid off 50 percent of the staff and 80 percent of the outside contractors who worked on vetting users.

When he made his buyout offer in April, Twitter was basically cash-neutral. But now, in addition to the drop in advertising revenue, it had to service the interest on more than $12 billion in debt.

When one of the employees at the meeting asked why it was necessary to come into the office if most of the people they dealt with were based elsewhere, Musk got angry. “Let me be crystal clear,” he began, slowly and coldly. “If people do not return to the office when they are able to return to the office, they cannot remain at the company. End of story. If you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office: resignation accepted. End of story.”

When Musk was given the news, he was genuinely disappointed. “Wow,” he said, “I thought he was going to be doing this with us.”

“I was very worried that if Elon and I parted on bad terms, he would tweet bad things about me and call me a libtard, and then his hundred million followers, some of whom may be violent, would come after me and my family.”

“What Elon doesn’t understand,” he said at the end of our conversation, “is that the rest of us do not have security people the way he does.”

The moderator asked what advice he would give to someone who wanted to be the next Elon Musk. “I’d be careful what you wish for,” he replied. “I’m not sure how many people would actually like to be me. The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly.”

“It’s striking a balance in a company,” he says. “To what extent do you allow dissent?” Musk did not share these qualms. Unfettered free speech did not extend to the workplace. He told them to root out people who were making very snarky comments. He wanted to rid the workforce of negativity.

How many would say yes? James thought it would be 2,000 out of the approximately 3,600 remaining employees. Ross wagered it would be 2,150. Musk chimed in with a low prediction: 1,800 would choose to stay. In the end, 2,492 said yes, a surprisingly high 69 percent of the workforce.

“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today.” A little later he added, “Please be prepared to do brief code reviews as I’m walking around the office.” It was confusing. One engineer based in Boston was the only person left on the team in charge of caching important data. He was afraid that if he boarded a plane, the system might go down while he was flying across the country and he’d be unable to fix it. He was also afraid that if he didn’t come in, he would be fired. He flew to San Francisco.

Musk stayed in meetings all afternoon, ignoring them. There was no food, and by 6 p.m., the engineers were not only irritated but hungry, so Andrew and security engineering director Christopher Stanley went out and got boxes of pizzas. “The mood had gotten edgy by then, and I think Elon was keeping them waiting on purpose,” says Andrew. “The pizza calmed things.” When Musk finally emerged at 8 p.m., he began what he called “desk-siding,”

Most people, including Ross and James, assumed her resignation was in reaction to Musk’s decision to make unilateral reinstatements and launch a poll about unbanning Trump. But what actually bothered Wheeler more was that Musk was hell-bent on another round of firings, and he demanded that she make a list of who she would let go. Earlier that week, she had stood in front of her sales organization and told them why they should opt in with the “yes” button to be part of the new, demanding Twitter. Now she would have to look some of those same people in the eye, the ones who had said yes, and tell them they were fired.

Musk decided he wanted to say there would be “no more layoffs.” His rationale was that the impending round of exits would be firing people “for cause” because their work was allegedly not good enough, rather than reduction-in-force layoffs, for which people would be due a generous severance. He was making a distinction that most people missed. “There are no more RIFs planned,” he declared at the outset of the meeting, to great applause.

The three rounds of layoffs and firings were so scattershot that it was initially hard to tally up the toll. When the dust settled, about 75 percent of the Twitter workforce had been cut. There were just under eight thousand employees when Musk took over on October 27. By mid-December, there were just over two thousand.

…they also noted that the dire predictions many of their colleagues had made did not come to pass. “In some ways, Musk was vindicated,” they wrote. “Twitter was less stable now, but the platform survived and mostly functioned even with the majority of employees gone. He had promised to right-size a bloated company, and now it operated on minimal head count.”

Ellison, who had been a mentor of Steve Jobs, gave Musk a piece of advice: he should not get into a fight with Apple. It was the one company that Twitter could not afford to alienate. Apple was a major advertiser. More importantly, Twitter could not survive unless it continued to be available in the iPhone’s App Store.

Roth and others at Twitter debated whether to block links to a New York Post story about what was purported to be (correctly, as it turned out) a laptop abandoned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The messages showed many of them scrambling to find rationales for banning mention of the story, such as claiming that it violated policies against using hacked material or might be part of a Russian disinformation plot. Those were flimsy covers for censoring a story, and both Roth and Jack Dorsey would later concede that doing so was a mistake.

Roth was, behind the scenes, a voice of honesty at Twitter. “I just reviewed the accounts,” he wrote in an internal memo. “None of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.” Nevertheless, Twitter executives refrained from challenging the accepted “Russiagate” narrative.

“You almost believe him,” Weiss told me afterward. It was an earnest rather than caustic comment. But even though she was impressed, she retained some of the skepticism that made her an independent journalist. At one point during their two-hour conversation, she asked how Tesla’s business interests in China might affect the way he managed Twitter. Musk got annoyed. That was not what the conversation was supposed to be about. Weiss persisted. Musk said that Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened. China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, had two sides. Weiss was disturbed.

“My jaw dropped.” Jim Baker had been the general counsel of the FBI, and he was distrusted in some conservative circles for being on the periphery of various controversies. “What the fuck?” she texted Musk. “You’re like asking the guy to do searches on himself? This makes no fucking sense.” Musk flipped out. “It’s like asking Al Capone to, like, look into his own taxes,” he said.

Musk had long been infuriated by the @elonjet account, which he thought was doxing and endangering him.

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” he tweeted in early November. That impressed Bari Weiss, but when she was putting together her first Twitter File thread, she discovered that Musk had done to @elonjet what the previous Twitter regime had done to some on the far right: @elonjet was being severely “visibility filtered” so that it did not show up in searches. She was disappointed; it seemed hypocritical.

Worse yet, especially from the vantage of making the site a haven for free speech, Musk arbitrarily suspended a handful of journalists who wrote about what he had done to @elonjet.

“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,” she says. “Some of the people he was kicking off were my biggest bullies on Twitter. I don’t like some of these people at all. But I felt like he was betraying the things he was claiming to want Twitter to be about—a public square that wasn’t rigged in favor of one side or the other. And just from a purely strategic perspective, he was martyring a lot of assholes.”

Musk got angry and then disappeared from the session. A few minutes later, Twitter abruptly shut it down. In fact, it shut down all of Spaces for a day in order to make it impossible for suspended users to join conversations.

Musk soon realized he had gone too far and looked for some way to reverse himself. He posted a poll asking users whether the barred journalists should have their accounts restored. More than 58 percent of the 3.6 million voters said yes. The accounts were restored.

…around 3 a.m., he impulsively tweeted it out: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” It made little sense, wasn’t funny, and managed, in just five words, to mock transgender people, conjure up conspiracies about the eighty-one-year-old public health official Anthony Fauci, scare off more advertisers, and create a new handful of enemies who would now never buy Teslas. His brother was among those who were outraged. “What the heck, man, this is an old guy who was just trying to figure things out during COVID,” Kimbal told him. “This is not okay.” Even Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor whose criticism of Fauci’s policies caused him to be filtered on Twitter, criticized the tweet. “I think that Fauci made tremendous mistakes,” he said. “But I think the right redress is not to prosecute him, but for history to remember him having made those mistakes.”

Musk commented, “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services.” Roth had nothing to do with pedophilia, but Musk’s insinuations stirred up Pizzagate-style conspiracists lurking in the dark recesses of Twitter who unleashed a barrage of homophobic and anti-Semitic attacks. A tabloid then published Roth’s address, forcing him to go into hiding. “Musk made the decision to share a defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia,” Roth later said. “I had to leave my home and sell it. Those are the consequences for this type of online harassment and speech.”

Kimbal and board chair Robyn Denholm kept pressing him, saying that his behavior was a factor. “The giant elephant in the room was that he was acting like a fucking idiot,” Kimbal says.

…the CEO of the storage division, who told him it was impossible to move server racks without a bevy of experts. “Bullshit,” Musk explained. “We have already loaded four onto the semi.” The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than five hundred pounds of pressure, so rolling a two-thousand-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only five hundred pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers.

“You’re an idiot,” Kimbal said. “Stop falling for weird shit.” The same was true for his Fauci tweet. “It’s not okay. It’s not funny. You can’t do that shit.” Kimbal also lectured James and Andrew for abetting him. “This is not okay, guys. This is not okay.”

Kimbal refused to talk about it. “I really don’t give a shit about Twitter,” he said. “It’s just a pimple on the ass of what should be your impact on the world.” Elon disagreed, but they didn’t argue about it.

The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost. The motley company pushed the ideal of scrappiness to its outer limits.

…for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. “By the time we learned this, the servers had already been unplugged and rolled out, so there was no way we would roll them back, plug them in, and then wipe them,” he says. Plus, the wiping software wasn’t working. “Fuck, what do we do?” he asked. Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them. So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says. “They all made it to Portland safely.” By the end of the week they had used all of the available trucks in Sacramento. Despite the area being pummeled by rain, they moved more than seven hundred of the racks in three days. The previous record at that facility had been moving thirty in a month.

All very exciting and inspiring, right? An example of Musk’s bold and scrappy approach! But as with all things Musk, it was, alas, not that simple.

For the next two months, Twitter was destabilized. The lack of servers caused meltdowns, including when Musk hosted a Twitter Spaces for presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. “In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,” Musk would admit in March 2023.

X.AI & Epilogue

His most valuable lieutenants at Tesla and SpaceX had learned ways to deflect his bad ideas and drip-feed him unwelcome information, but the legacy employees at Twitter didn’t know how to handle him.

Musk dubbed his new company X.AI and personally recruited Igor Babuschkin, a leading AI researcher at Google’s DeepMind unit, to be the chief engineer.

He was having some trouble recruiting AI scientists because the new frenzy about the field meant that anyone with experience could command starting bonuses of a million dollars or more. “It will be easier to get them if they can become founders of a new company and get equity in it,” he explained.

“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

Musk believed in a fail-fast approach to building rockets. Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat. “We don’t want to design to eliminate every risk,” he said. “Otherwise, we will never get anywhere.”

Most of the public would consider it a flaming failure. And for a moment, as he stared at the monitor, Musk seemed subdued. But the rest of the control room began applauding. They were jubilant at what they had achieved and what they had learned. Musk finally stood up, put his hands above his head, and turned to the room. “Nicely done guys,” he said. “Success. Our goal was to get clear of the pad and explode out of sight, and we did. There’s too much that can go wrong to get to orbit the first time. This is an awesome day.”

Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults.”

Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.