The Elon Musk Blog Series

Musk’s Character

In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one.

If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune. By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter.

…the explanation for both sides of the story—the cult-like adulation right alongside the grudging willingness to endure what sounds like blatant hell—comes down to respect. The people who work for Musk, no matter how they feel about his management style, feel an immense amount of respect—for his intelligence, for his work ethic, for his guts, and for the gravity of the missions he’s undertaken, missions that make all other potential jobs seem trivial and pointless. Many of the people I talked to also alluded to their respect for his integrity. One way this integrity comes through is in his consistency. He’s been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart.

He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.

He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that.

Almost every person I talked to at both Tesla and SpaceX emphasized how much of an expert Musk is at their particular field, whether that field be car batteries, car design, electric motors, rocket structures, rocket engines, rocket electronics (“avionics”), or aerospace engineering. He can do this because of a combination of his immensely thick tree trunk of fundamental understanding of physics and engineering and his genius-level ability to retain information as he learns it. It’s that insane breadth of expertise that allows Musk to maintain such an abnormally high level of control over everything that happens at his companies. About SpaceX’s rockets, Musk said, “I know my rocket inside out and backward. I can tell you the heat treating temper of the skin material, where it changes, why we chose that material, the welding technique…down to the gnat’s ass.”

…you have no idea. For the CEO of the company, he has an incredibly deep stack—he has all that info available to him, and he can drill down on any one thing, and often does. He’s making very low-level decisions and very low-level course directions for the company, with high fidelity, and I can’t imagine it working with anyone else at any other company. The thought of one person being a key decision point for so many things is remarkable to me—he can hold it all it in his head and recall it on demand in real time, as necessary, in order to be able to make good decisions.

I’ve been drinking a tall glass of the Elon Musk Kool-Aid throughout. I’m very, very into it. I kind of feel like that’s fine, right? The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren’t supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge, old industries that aren’t supposed to be revolutionable. After emerging from the 1990s dotcom party with $180 million, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 900-pound sumo wrestlers—the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry, the military-industrial complex, the energy utilities—and he might actually be winning. And all of this, it really seems, for the purpose of giving our species a better future.

When people think about what makes someone like Elon Musk so effective, they often focus on the hardware—and Musk’s hardware has some pretty impressive specs. But the more I learn about Musk and other people who seem to have superhuman powers—whether it be Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Genghis Khan, Marie Curie, John Lennon, Ayn Rand,2 or Louis C.K.—the more I’m convinced that it’s their software, not their natural-born intelligence or talents, that makes them so rare and so effective.

First Principles Thinking

I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about.

…people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics.

I certainly admire the discoveries of the great scientists. They’re discovering what already exists—it’s a deeper understanding of how the universe already works. That’s cool—but the universe already sort of knows that. What matters is knowledge in a human context. What I’m trying to ensure is that knowledge in a human context is still possible in the future. So it’s sort of like—I’m more like the gardener, and then there are the flowers. If there’s no garden, there’s no flowers. I could try to be a flower in the garden, or I could try to make sure there is a garden. So I’m trying to make sure there is a garden, such that in the future, many Feynmans may bloom.

I was at one point thinking about doing physics as a career—I did undergrad in physics—but in order to really advance physics these days, you need the data. Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of engineering. This debate—“Which is better, engineers or scientists? Aren’t scientists better? Wasn’t Einstein the smartest person?”—personally, I think that engineering is better because in the absence of the engineering, you do not have the data. You just hit a limit. And yeah, you can be real smart within the context of the limit of the data you have, but unless you have a way to get more data, you can’t make progress. Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.

When I asked Musk about his knowledge of business, he scolded me, explaining, “I don’t know what a business is. All a company is is a bunch of people together to create a product or service. There’s no such thing as a business, just pursuit of a goal—a group of people pursuing a goal.”

The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef. The words “cook” and “chef” seem kind of like synonyms. And in the real world, they’re often used interchangeably. But in this post, when I say chef, I don’t mean any ordinary chef. I mean the trailblazing chef—the kind of chef who invents recipes. And for our purposes, everyone else who enters a kitchen—all those who follow recipes—is a cook. Everything you eat—every part of every cuisine we know so well—was at some point in the past created for the first time. Wheat, tomatoes, salt, and milk go back a long time, but at some point, someone said, “What if I take those ingredients and do this…and this…..and this……” and ended up with the world’s first pizza. That’s the work of a chef. Since then, god knows how many people have made a pizza. That’s the work of a cook. The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw edible ingredients. Those are her puzzle pieces, her building blocks, and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds. The cook works off of some version of what’s already out there—a recipe of some kind, a meal she tried and liked, a dish she watched someone else make.

On a typical day, a “reasoning cook” and a “reasoning chef” don’t operate that differently. Even the chef becomes quickly exhausted by the mental energy required for first principles reasoning, and usually, doing so isn’t worth his time. Both types of people spend an average day with their brain software running on auto-pilot and their conscious decision-making centers dormant. But then comes a day when something new needs to be figured out. Maybe the cook and the chef are each given the new task at work to create a better marketing strategy. Or maybe they’re unhappy with that job and want to think of what business to start. Maybe they have a crush on someone they never expected to have feelings for and they need to figure out what to do about it. Whatever this new situation is, auto-pilot won’t suffice—this is something new and neither the chef’s nor the cook’s software has done this before. Which leaves only two options: Create. Or copy.

Musk calls the cook’s way of thinking “reasoning by analogy” (as opposed to reasoning by first principles), which is a nice euphemism.

For cooks, even the more innovative kind, there’s almost always a ceiling on the size of the splash they can make in the world, unless there’s some serious luck involved. Chefs aren’t guaranteed to do anything good, but when there’s a little talent and a lot of persistence, they’re almost certain to make a splash. Sometimes the chef is the one brave enough to go for something big—but other times, someone doesn’t feel the desire to make a splash and the chef is the one with the strength of character to step out of the game and in favor of keeping it small. Being a chef isn’t being like Elon Musk—it’s being yourself.

Your current life, with all its facets and complexity, is like a reasoning industry album. The question is, how did that set of songs come to be? How were the songs composed, and by whom? And in those critical do-or-die moments when it’s time to write a new song, how do you do your creating? Do you dig deep into yourself? Do you start with the drumbeat and chords of an existing song and write your own melody on top of it? Do you just play covers? I know what you want the answers to these questions to be. This is a straightforward one—it’s clearly better to be a chef. But unlike the case with most major distinctions in life—hard-working vs. lazy, ethical vs. dishonest, considerate vs. selfish—when the chef/cook distinction passes right in front of us, we often don’t even notice it’s there.

To see the truth, you need to zoom way out until you can see the real leader of the cooks—the cookbook. But we don’t tend to zoom out, and when we look around at our life, zoomed in, what appears to be a highly unique and independent self may be an optical illusion.8 What often feels like independent reasoning when zoomed out is actually playing connect-the-dots on a pre-printed set of steps laid out by someone else. What feels like personal principles might just be the general tenets of your tribe. What feels like original opinions may have actually been spoon-fed to us by the media or our parents or friends or our religion or a celebrity. What feels like Roark might actually be Keating. What feels like our chosen life path could just be one of a handful of pre-set, tribe-approved yellow brick roads. What feels like creativity might be filling in a coloring book—and making sure to stay inside the lines. Because of this optical illusion, we’re unable to see the flaws in our own thinking or recognize an unusually great thinker when we see one. Instead, when a superbly science-minded, independent-thinking chef like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein comes around, what do we attribute their success to? Awesome fucking hardware.

The way we see it, we’re all a bunch of independent-thinking chefs—and it’s just that Musk is a really impressive chef. Which is both A) overrating Musk and B) overrating ourselves. And completely missing the real story. Musk is an impressive chef for sure, but what makes him such an extreme standout isn’t that he’s impressive—it’s that most of us aren’t chefs at all. It’s like a bunch of typewriters looking at a computer and saying, “Man, that is one talented typewriter.”

Conventional wisdom is slow to move, and there’s significant lag time between when something becomes reality and when conventional wisdom is revised to reflect that reality. And by the time it does, reality has moved on to something else. But chefs don’t pay attention to that, reasoning instead using their eyes and ears and experience. By ignoring conventional wisdom in favor of simply looking at the present for what it really is and staying up-to-date with the facts of the world as they change in real-time—in spite of what conventional wisdom has to say—the chef can act on information the rest of us haven’t been given permission to act on yet.

People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it’s mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you’re brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion—one that may or may not fall within the box.

When Steve Jobs9 and Apple turned their attention to phones, they didn’t start by saying, “Okay well people seem to like this kind of keyboard more than that kind, and everyone seems unhappy with the difficulty of hitting the numbers on their keyboards—so let’s get creative and make the best phone keyboard yet!” They simply asked, “What should a mobile device be?” and in their from-scratch reasoning, a physical keyboard didn’t end up as part of the plan at all. It didn’t take genius to come up with the design of the iPhone—it’s actually pretty logical—it just took the ability to not copy.

Whatever the time, place, or industry, anytime something really big happens, there’s almost always an experimenting chef at the center of it—not being anything magical, just trusting their brain and working from scratch. Our world, like our cuisines, was created by these people—the rest of us are just along for the ride. Yeah, Musk is smart as fuck and insanely ambitious—but that’s not why he’s beating everybody. What makes Musk so rad is that he’s a software outlier. A chef in a world of cooks. A science geologist in a world of flood geologists. A brain software pro in a world where people don’t realize brain software is a thing. That’s Elon Musk’s secret sauce. Which is why the real story here isn’t Musk. It’s us. The real puzzle in this series isn’t why Elon Musk is trying to end the era of gas cars or why he’s trying to land a rocket or why he cares so much about colonizing Mars—it’s why Elon Musk is so rare.

…the flood geologists were victims of their own certainty. Without certainty, dogma has no power. And when data is required in order to believe something, false dogma has no legs to stand on. It wasn’t the church dogma that hindered the flood geologists, it was the church mentality of faith-based certainty. That’s what Stephen Hawking meant when he said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Neither the science geologist nor the flood geologist started off with knowledge. But what gave the science geologist the power to seek out the truth was knowing that he lacked knowledge. The science geologists subscribed to the lab mentality, which starts by saying “I don’t know shit” and works upwards from there.

Here’s Isaac Newton: To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me. And Richard Feynman: I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. And Niels Bohr: Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question. Musk has said his own version: You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.

If you were alone in a room with a car and wanted to figure out how it worked, you’d probably start by taking it apart as much as you could and examining the parts and how they all fit together. To do the same with our thinking, we need to revert to our four-year-old selves and start deconstructing our software by resuming the Why game our parents and teachers shut down decades ago. It’s time to roll up our sleeves, pop open the hood, and get our hands dirty with a bunch of not-that-fun questions about what we truly want, what’s truly possible, and whether the way we’re living our lives follows logically from those things.

Software of the Mind

Your entire life runs on the software in your head—why wouldn’t you obsess over optimizing it? And yet, not only do most of us not obsess over our own software—most of us don’t even understand our own software, how it works, or why it works that way.

A child’s instinct isn’t just to know what to do and not to do, she wants to understand the rules of her environment. And to understand something, you have to have a sense of how that thing was built. When parents and teachers tell a kid to do XYZ and to simply obey, it’s like installing a piece of already-designed software in the kid’s head. When kids ask Why? and then Why? and then Why?, they’re trying to deconstruct that software to see how it was built—to get down to the first principles underneath so they can weigh how much they should actually care about what the adults seem so insistent upon.

Creative thinking is a close cousin of first principles reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways. People think of creativity as a natural born talent, but it’s actually much more of a way of thinking—it’s the thinking version of painting onto a blank canvas. But to do that requires brain software that’s skilled and practiced at coming up with new things, and school trains us on the exact opposite concept—to follow the leader, single-file, and to get really good at taking tests. Instead of a blank canvas, school hands kids a coloring book and tells them to stay within the lines.4 What this all amounts to is that during our brain’s most malleable years, parents, teachers, and society end up putting our clay in a mold and squeezing it tightly into a preset shape.

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

…we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public, your tribe’s dogma, and society’s conventional wisdom. We have a bunch of romantic words for the world’s chefs that sound impressive but are actually just a result of them having lost this respect. Being a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules. Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to blaze yourself a new one. Being a groundbreaker is just knowing that the ground wasn’t laid by anyone that impressive and so feeling no need to keep it intact. Not respecting society is totally counterintuitive to what we’re taught when we grow up—but it makes perfect sense if you just look at what your eyes and experience tell you.

I’m a huge believer in taking feedback. I’m trying to create a mental model that’s accurate, and if I have a wrong view on something, or if there’s a nuanced improvement that can be made, I’ll say, “I used to think this one thing that turned out to be wrong—now thank goodness I don’t have that wrong belief.” To a chef in the lab, negative feedback is a free boost forward in progress, courtesy of someone else. Pure upside.

Courage & Failure

Most people would have stuck with the Stanford program—because they had already told everyone about it and it would be weird to quit, because it was Stanford, because it was a more normal path, because it was safer, because the internet might be a fad, because what if he were 35 one day and was a failure with no money because he couldn’t get a good job without the right degree. Musk quit the program after two days.

Musk’s stated philosophy is, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. —Henry Ford Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. —Winston Churchill13 I have not failed 700 times. I’ve succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a lightbulb. —Thomas Edison There’s no more reliable corollary than super-successful people thinking failure is fucking awesome.

We’re more afraid of public speaking than texting on the highway, more afraid of approaching an attractive stranger in a bar than marrying the wrong person, more afraid of not being able to afford the same lifestyle as our friends than spending 50 years in a meaningless career—all because embarrassment, rejection, and not fitting in really sucked for hunters and gatherers.

I talked to Musk about the United States and the way the forefathers reasoned by first principles when they started the country. He said he thought the reason they could do so is that they had a fresh slate to work with. The European countries of that era would have had a much harder time trying to do something like that—because, as he told me, they were “trapped in their own history.” I’ve heard Musk use this same phrase to describe the big auto and aerospace companies of today. He sees Tesla and SpaceX like the late 18th century USA—fresh new labs ready for experiments—but when he looks at other companies in their industries, he sees an inability to drive their strategies from a clean slate mentality. Referring to the aerospace industry, Musk said, “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.” Being trapped in your history means you don’t know how to change, you’ve forgotten how to innovate, and you’re stuck in the identity box the world has put you in. And you end up being the cancer researcher we mentioned who only tries likely-to-succeed experimentation within the comfort zone he knows best.

Jobs looks back on his firing from Apple in 1986 as a blessing in disguise. He said:14 “Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Being fired “freed” Jobs from the shackles of his own history.

Industry Disruption

The problem with the question “Why did X technology stop moving forward?” is that it’s misunderstanding how progress works. Instead of asking why technological progress sometimes stops, we have to ask the question: Why does technological progress ever happen at all?

The way technology works is that by default, it stands still, and it moves forward only when something pushes it forward. We often have the same intuitive misconception when we think about evolution. Natural selection doesn’t make things “better”—it just optimizes biology to best survive in whatever environmental circumstances it finds itself. When something in that environment changes—a predator mutates and becomes faster, a certain type of food becomes scarce, an ice age rolls in—it means species that were previously optimized to the environment no longer are. The environmental change alters the natural selection criteria, which applies a pressure on the species as it is, and over time, the genetics of the species will react to the pressure by changing in order to optimize to the new environment. When it comes to technology, a totally free and open market is the natural environment.

But for people whose base needs are being met, what are the yearning desires that then lie at the core of their motivation? What does “pursuing your self-interest” mean for them? Well, it depends on the culture. In certain cultures, the fear of failure is so strong that it outweighs desires like glory or great fortune, and the primary inner drive becomes to just make sure you’re passable. In others, the deepest drive of the people might be religious salvation, community or family service, a leisurely lifestyle, or spiritual enlightenment.

An established industry full of existing winners running on greed is like the highest layer of trees in a crowded rainforest. They’ll push upward only as needed, elbowing each other for little gains and victories as they vie for sunlight, mostly just trying to keep their spot in the canopy. Greed just wants sunlight—it doesn’t care how high up it is when it gets it. But below, the hungry underdog burns for sunlight and will spend 100 hours a week trying to figure out how to get it. When the breakthrough comes, the underdog bursts up through the canopy into the open sky and spreads its leaves out wide. Suddenly, the trees that had been on top are blocked from the sun. Greed is then replaced by the much more powerful drive of survival, and innovation kicks into high gear as they scramble upwards for their life. The environment has changed—it’s been disrupted—and in this new world, created by the underdog disruptor, companies have to innovate in order to re-optimize. Some end up back on top, others die—and at the end of it all, technology has jolted forward. We…

…intuition tells us that technology, social norms, movements and ideas just move forward through time, as if forward progress is a river and those things are on a raft gliding through. We so associate the passage of time with progress that we use the term “the future” to refer to a better, more advanced version of our present world. In reality, if a more advanced future does happen, it’s because that future was willed into our lives by a few brave people. The present isn’t welcoming of an advanced future because the present is run by a thick canopy made up of the ideas, norms, and technologies of the past. There’ll be incremental tweaks and slight iterations on proven-to-work concepts, which may seem to us like moving into the future, but it’s really just a polishing up of the past. When the real change arrives, you know you’re seeing it. It’s a distinct and exhilarating feeling when you witness a disrupting innovator ram its way through the canopy.

…those world-changing moments don’t just smoothly glide into the world: these leaps into the future usually have to jam themselves through the canopy and then battle to keep themselves there. The past, which likes to loiter casually in our present world, hates when a piece of the future bursts onto the scene, because that exposes the past for being what it really is—the past. So a new and disruptive technology is often met with hostility as it emerges, as the existing canopy does whatever it can to squash the potential disruptor out of existence before it can gain momentum and start to spread. The old guard knows that once a disruptor gets a foothold and starts quickly spreading its ideas, the entire game changes—and once that balance tips, now instead of trying to squash the disruptor, everyone has to scramble to try to emulate it.

Change doesn’t happen on a familiar landscape—change has to construct the landscape itself. This is part of the reason the challenges Tesla has taken on are so enormous. Henry Ford didn’t just build a car—he built a landscape, defining what a car was. Since then, car companies have worked within Ford’s landscape.

Energy & Climate

It’s also the worst culprit for CO2 emissions, releasing about 30% more CO2 than the burning of oil and about double that of natural gas when generating an equivalent amount of heat.4 The US is to coal as Saudi Arabia is to oil, possessing 22% of the world’s coal, the most of any nation. China, though, has become by far the world’s largest consumer of coal—over half of the coal burned in the world in recent years was burned in China.

The United States is by far the biggest consumer of oil in the world, consuming over 20% of the world’s oil and about double the next biggest consumer. The US is also one of the three biggest oil producers in the world, alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia, who all produce roughly the same amount.

…burning a log and releasing all that CO2 does not tamper with the atmosphere’s carbon levels. Why? Because the carbon that’s being released was recently in the atmosphere, and if you hadn’t set the log on fire, it would have likely decomposed, which would release the carbon back into the world anyway. The log’s carbon was only being held temporarily hostage, and releasing it through combustion has little effect.

…sometimes, a small portion of carbon in the cycle drops out of the cycle for the long term—it happens when a plant or animal dies but for some reason doesn’t decay normally. Instead, before it can decay and release its carbon back into the cycle, it’s buried underground. Over time, that lost carbon adds up. And today, the Earth’s fossil fuels make up a huge mass of lost carbon—carbon that long ago was taken hostage permanently, and carbon that the carbon cycle does not expect to be involved in its routine.

This is also even more fragile than is intuitive. First, you don’t need the average temperature to go up by a catastrophic amount to have a catastrophe—because the average temp could go up by only 3ºC but the max temp rises by a lot more. Just one day at an outlier high like 58ºC (136ºF) would wipe out most of the Earth’s crops and animals.

…the total range of temperature a planet can be goes all the way down to absolute zero: -273ºC (-459ºF). So a difference of 5ºC, enough to bury the northern part of the world under an ocean of ice, is really only about a 1.5% fluctuation in temperature—not something like 10%, which is what it seems like.

Nation interdependence can be productive and important, but nations being dependent on other nations for their survival is never a great thing, and the need to import fossil fuels is one of the major reasons for modern nation ultra-dependency.

The US has become a natural gas consumption beast and by far the biggest one in the world.

The US is even more of an oil-consumption beast—almost double the second biggest oil-consuming country, China, and more than four times #3 on the list, Japan.

The tactic to stay alive longer is always the same—put out misinformation to create confusion, and make it political so half the country feels like they’re going against “their own team” if they side against the industry. The super-clever way they create confusion is by generating the public perception that there’s a genuine debate among scientists. That’s how you make a 97% consensus seem like an open question…

The same tactic was used a few decades ago when 98% of scientists said smoking caused lung cancer, but the tobacco industry convinced the public for a long time that “scientists disagree” about whether smoking is harmful.

When the 1990 California Zero Emissions Mandate forced car companies to make an EV in order to continue selling cars in CA, the oil industry saw it as a small tumor they needed to swiftly nip in the bud before it grew into a serious threat. Soon, a new voice popped up, a grassroots campaign called “Californians Against Utility Company Abuse” (CAUCA). The campaign staged protests against the state’s proposed utility investments in alternative-vehicle support systems. They also mentioned that “the environmental benefits of electric cars were dubious.”39 But as it turns out, CAUCA was created by a PR firm who was hired and funded by the oil industry. Eventually, the mandate was repealed, EVs disappeared, and the tumor was squashed.

Tesla & EVs

The Tesla factory is working on upping its output from 30,000 cars/year to 50,000, or about 1,000 per week. They seemed to be pumping out cars incredibly quickly, so I was blown away to learn that Toyota had been on a 1,000 cars per day clip when they inhabited the factory.

Ford and his new company charged ahead making gas-powered cars, but at the time, gas cars were hardly the norm. Cars were a new technology, and at the beginning of the century, 40% of American cars were powered by steam and 38% were electric—gas cars only made up 22% of the American market.

In 1912, engineer Charles Kettering invented the electric car starter, eliminating the need to laboriously and dangerously hand crank your gas car on, and the newly invented muffler significantly reduced gas engine noise. Suddenly, a lot of the things that sucked about gas cars didn’t suck anymore—and they had become much cheaper than electric cars. Ford’s Model T took over America, and by 1914, 99% of new American cars ran on gas. By 1920, electric cars dropped entirely out of commercial production.27 This was not an inevitable outcome. The future of cars had been up for grabs, and Ford had simply outsmarted his competition. Burning fuel was the way of the past and electricity was the way of the future—but Ford had created a provable, profitable business model for making cars, one that didn’t yet exist for electric cars, and it quickly became too much of an uphill battle for electric car makers to try to turn the tide. So they stopped.

I asked Musk about his opinion on Henry Ford. He said, “Ford was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed.”

AC Propulsion had figured out two huge things: First, the tzero was fast—it went 0 to 60 in 4.9 seconds, which was crazy fast for an electric car and put it on par with the fast gas cars. Second, they had made big progress on an enormous EV shortcoming by getting innovative with the battery. Previous EVs had used lead-acid batteries, which were heavy and limited. AC Propulsion realized that the laptop and mobile phone industry had been pouring development into making small 18650 lithium-ion batteries increasingly efficient, and that those batteries had gotten really advanced.

EVs had always been limited to a 60 or 80 or maybe a 120-mile range. The tzero could go 250 miles on a single charge.

The overarching mission wasn’t to build the biggest car company in the world. It was to solve a bunch of long-standing EV shortcomings and build such an insanely great car that it could change everyone’s perception of what an EV could be and force the world’s big car companies to have to develop their own line of great EVs. Their end goal, and the company’s official mission, was “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”

The Roadster didn’t change the world—no $110,000 car ever could—but it sent a message to the industry that Tesla was for real.

…some of the major car companies took notice—Nissan soon launched the all-electric Leaf and GM launched the plug-in electric Chevy Volt soon after the Roadster’s appearance (Bob Lutz, who was Chairman of GM at the time, openly credits Tesla for their decision to make the Volt, saying that after the Roadster unveiling, he went to the GM board and asked, “If a little company in California can do this, why can’t we?”).

…when I stepped into the Tesla design studio to meet von Holzhausen, I was excited to meet the uber-flamboyant diva celebrity car designer, just hoping I would understand what he was saying through his unbelievably thick German accent—and was horribly disappointed to meet an extremely normal-acting American man.

“A company like GM is a finance-driven company who always has to live up to financial expectations. Here we look at it the other way around—the product is successful when it’s great, and the company becomes great because of that.” (This mirrored what Musk had told me earlier in the day: “The moment the person leading a company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company’s done. The moment the CFO becomes CEO—it’s done. Game over.”) Von Holzhausen went on, saying, “Another difference is that at other companies, engineering comes first—a design package is prescribed on the designer and they’re told to make it beautiful. At Tesla, design and engineering are assigned equal value, and Elon keeps them opposed to each other.”

This all sounded uncannily similar to how Steve Jobs had done things at Apple. He obsessed over making “insanely great products,” and he never paid attention to what other companies were doing, always coming at things from a clean sheet of paper perspective. When Apple decided to make a phone, they didn’t try to make a better Blackberry—they asked, “What should a mobile phone be?” Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse—and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there’s often a huge opportunity there.

The Tesla battery is heavy and they wanted to make the body super light to offset some of that weight—so they turned to SpaceX and used its advanced rocket technology to make Tesla the only North American car with an all aluminum body.

They didn’t like the dealership model and wanted to sell directly to customers, but many states don’t allow that, so one by one, they’re fighting the states that won’t and slowly overturning direct car sales bans.

…when their first car came out, there was no iPad yet, and 17″ touchscreens suitable for a car didn’t exist. So they built their own.

It’s a rule of thumb in the car world that every $5,000 decrease in car price approximately doubles the number of buyers who can afford the car. So if Tesla can somehow come out with a stellar EV for about $35,000 less than the Model S, it would double the buyer pool 7 times, or multiply it by 125-fold. Which would now mean most people could afford it.

Right now, the Model 3 battery costs around $20,000. Even if Tesla ditches the high-tech aluminum body, makes the car smaller, and ditches some of the fanciest things about the Model S, the battery pack alone makes a price like $35,000 impossible.

…the world’s combined annual output of lithium-ion batteries is 30GWh—mostly for use in laptops and mobile phones. The Gigafactory will make more than that each year, which means it will more than double the total lithium-ion batteries made each year globally.

“I know we can’t get enough lithium-ion batteries unless we build this bloody factory, and I know no one else is building this thing.” The numbers make this necessity clear. To  make enough batteries for their planned 500,000 cars a year, Tesla will need about 30GWh of lithium-ion batteries a year—the current world output—meaning that without building the Gigafactory, they’d have to use every single lithium-ion battery in the world.

Tesla’s work at the Gigafactory will make batteries a lot cheaper. Musk says the price of the battery should go down by at least 30%. Right now, Musk says Tesla could make their cars with a 500 mile range—they don’t do it because it would increase the cost of the car. But as battery prices go down, EV ranges will go up as well.

Holzhausen has worked at three of these other companies. The way he sees it, “they’re trapped in their manufacturing legacy process, trapped in gas engines being their bread and butter, trapped in their dealership model, trapped in their own history.” Musk explains it as a lack of guts and originality: “The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward.”

Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsche said he doesn’t expect EVs to sell well for a while…

Toyota and Honda, are both skeptical about EVs and have been pouring their future into hybrids and hydrogen cars instead.

Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is so anti-EV that he’s told the world not to buy their Fiat 500e EV, saying they’re only selling it because regulations have forced them to.

The average new gas car gets 23 MPG. Anything above 30 MPG is really good for a gas car, and anything below 15 or 17 is bad. For reference, remember that an EV running on just coal-produced electricity would have an MPGghg of 30 (so even in a hypothetical entirely coal-powered state, an EV would be the same as a highly efficient gas car), and an EV running on just natural gas-powered electricity would have an MPGghg of 54 and just top the Toyota Prius, which runs at 50 MPG.

…even for the 17% of the population living in the worst coal states, an EV beats almost all gas cars.

…the grid is getting cleaner every year, it means an EV gets cleaner as time goes by. Gas cars are locked where they are, and they’ll be stuck watching as the future pulls away from them.

Musk and Tesla are doing right now. If there aren’t enough charging stations for long-trips, build an energy network of Superchargers. If scalability is held back by the high price of lithium-ion batteries, build a factory that doubles the world supply of them to bring the price down. Just get it done.

A company trying to rise to the top of their industry would hold their innovation secrets close—but because Tesla’s goal is to transform the industry, in 2014, Tesla made all of their patents available to whomever wanted them.

SpaceX & Rockets

Kennedy’s advisors told him that the Soviets had too big a lead for the US to beat them at any near-term achievements—but that the prospect of a manned moon landing was far enough in the future that the US had a fighting chance to get there first. So Kennedy gave his famous “we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hahhd” speech, and directed an outrageous amount of funding at the mission…

…you can only imagine how surprised they’d be if you told them in 1972, after just watching 12 humans walk on the moon, that 43 years later, in the impossibly futuristic-sounding year 2015, the number of people to set foot on the moon would still be 12.

So what happened? After such a wildly exciting decade of human space adventure, why did we just stop? Well, like we found in the Tesla post, “Why did we stop?” is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask: Why were we ever adventurous about sending humans into space in the first place?

In the face of international embarrassment at a time when everyone was trying to figure out whose economic system was better, the US government agreed to drop the usual rules for a few years to pour whatever resources were necessary on the problem to make sure they won that argument—…

And once they won it, the contest was over and so were the special rules. And the US went back to spending money like a normal person.

Over a third of all space debris originated from just two events: China’s 2007 anti-satellite test…

…and a 2009 collision between two satellites that exploded into 2,000 debris chunks.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!

Musk believed—and still believes—that around .25% of US GDP, or about 1% of the budget, should be dedicated to space. He makes it clear that he’s not suggesting a return to the 4%-of-the-budget days of the 60s—just an increase from the less-than-.5% level it’s at today. “For 1%,” he says, “we can buy life insurance.”

To Musk, what’s missing is a way to go to Mars affordably. He calls the United States “a nation of explorers” and “the spirit of human exploration distilled,” and he believes that if going to Mars were much cheaper, plenty of will would arise. But because this isn’t something that’s been remotely possible, no one is talking about it, and whatever will there is in people to go to Mars is totally dormant.

It became clear that there wasn’t anything to prevent us from doing it. Rocket technology had not materially improved since the ’60s—arguably it had gone backward!”

Musk did what everyone does when they want to become a world-class rocket scientist in about a year with no schooling—he read some stuff. He read books like this and this and this and this and basically memorized all of them. Rocket expert Jim Cantrell, who met Musk around that time and was on the failed trip to Russia with him, says “He would quote passages verbatim from these books. He became very conversant in the material.”2 To supplement his reading, Musk asked a lot of questions of a lot of people. Cantrell, who calls Musk “by far the single smartest person that I have ever worked with,” says that Musk “hired as many of my colleagues in the rocket and spacecraft business that were willing to consult with him” and that “it was as if he would suck the experience out of them.”

There seem to be lots of stories like this that reflect on SpaceX being unusually meritocratic—I met with Zach Dunn, the Senior Director of Launch Engineering, who seemed to be about 12 years old. Dunn told me he started as an intern just a few years ago.

…rather than outsource most of the parts of the rocket-making process to third party suppliers, SpaceX does nearly all of the major pieces itself, maintaining ownership and control over most of the supply chain.

Old-fashioned industrialists, like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, were all about vertical integration, as is Apple today in many ways. Most of today’s companies avoid taking on the massive scope vertical integration requires, but for a quality control freak, like Musk or Jobs, it’s the only way they’d have it.

Musk sees cost-reduction as the way to get us to Mars, but because he sees it as the only aspect of space travel that currently can be improved in a meaningful way. He says, “Speed for a rocket is always going to be roughly the same. The convenience and comfort is going to be about the same. Reliability…there’s not going to be much improvement there. So you’re really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that’s cost.”

“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering … Even if better technology is available, they’re still using legacy components, often ones that were developed in the 1960s … [many] use Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.”

“There’s this tendency of big aerospace companies to outsource everything … They outsource to subcontractors, and then the subcontractors outsource to sub-subcontractors, and so on. You have to go four or five layers down to find somebody actually doing something useful—actually cutting metal, shaping atoms. Every level above that tacks on profit—it’s overhead to the fifth power.”

The failures were caused by tiny things. Specifically, a corroded nut not holding up under the pressure, liquid in the rocket sloshing around more than expected, and the first stage engines shutting down a few seconds too late during stage separation. You can get everything 99.9% right, and the last .1% will explode the rocket in a catastrophic failure. Space is hard.

No in between. No partial credit. He’d had three failures already. It would have been over. We’re talking Harvard Business School case study — rich guy who goes into the rocket business and loses it all.”

Falcon 1 was also the most cost-efficient rocket ever to launch—priced at $7.9 million, it cost less than a third of the best US alternative at the time.

The problem is that rockets have to burn fuel—Musk has even said he thinks all transportation will eventually go electric, except rockets. The reason is Newton’s Third Law: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s third law is why a deflating balloon will move in the opposite direction that it’s shooting air out, why a gun jolts backward when it shoots…

Musk would love to have a better way than exploding fuel to power rockets, but he’s not sure we’ll ever find one. I asked him about it, and he said, “For rockets to go electric, there would have to be a few Nobel Prizes awarded.”

…when an object in orbit—which we established earlier has to be traveling at about 17,000 mph (27,300 km/h)—decides it’s over it and tries to come back to Earth, it experiences the equivalent of a 17,000 mph hurricane. Our official hurricane “levels” go from category 1 (74-95 mph) to category 5 (which starts at 155 mph), going up a level roughly for every 20 mph increase in wind speeds. At ground level, moving 17,000 mph would be like hanging out in a category 842 hurricane. The force of a category 842 hurricane would be lower in the thin atmosphere at the high altitudes where objects first enter—but still.

The spacecraft’s blistering speed in the upper atmosphere means the air in front of an incoming capsule doesn’t have time to “get out of the way” and becomes super-compressed and blazingly hot. Lower, where the atmosphere is thicker, the spacecraft has to handle the heat of the intense atmospheric drag. Rocks can’t handle it—which is why they turn into shooting stars—and building a spacecraft that can requires a lot of fancy technology.

Falcon 9’s third launch made history again, when on a demo mission for NASA, Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to attach to the ISS.

The plumes of white smoke coming out of the rocket before launch is oxygen from the liquid oxygen tank in the rocket as some of it escapes as gas.

About five seconds before liftoff, a deluge system called “Niagara” starts flooding the launch site with water. The purpose of this is to muffle the deafening sound of the engines, because otherwise, the sound waves would be so powerful that they’d actually damage the rocket.

The engines start firing a couple seconds before liftoff. What’s happening is that huge clamps are holding the rocket down as the engines fire so a computer can quickly test them to make sure they’re all working. If they are, the clamps release at T-0 and the rocket takes off.

Timing is critical down to the second. Even one second off schedule will mess up the rendezvous with the ISS.

Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes.

Then—on the very next launch—this happened…

ULA charges the government—and the US taxpayers—$380 million per launch. For a similar launch, the US government only pays SpaceX $133 million. For launches with other customers, without all of NASA’s special requirements, SpaceX charges $60 million per launch.

Europe’s Arianespace—a major player in the global launch industry—asked European governments for additional subsidies to handle competition from SpaceX. A Falcon 9 trip to GTO (the highest satellite orbit) now costs $15 million less than a launch on China’s historically-cheap Long March rocket. As for the other major player in the launch market, Musk has said, “My family fears that the Russians will assassinate me.”21 All around the world, launch customers are noticing what SpaceX is doing, then looking at their own launch company and asking, “Wait why am I paying so much?”

ULA, the Boeing and Lockheed joint venture, charges more than anyone for a space launch. But it doesn’t matter what they charge. ULA doesn’t have to compete with the rest of the world’s launch market—because ULA gets a constant flow of automatic business from the US military.

…many of the decision-makers in the US Department of Defense are friends with the leadership of ULA, and ULA is a common place for DoD officials to work when they retire from government. So ULA is more likely to get a nod and a wink from the DoD than an audit into how they spend their money. What that all adds up to is at best, a flawed system that puts zero pressure on lowering costs and at worst, a grand-scale government scandal—all paid for by the US taxpayer.

…in order to be awarded a military launch contract, a company needs special certification, and curiously, SpaceX had a very hard time becoming certified.

“These are not pushovers, it’s the military-industrial complex. You know in movies, how they do terrible things? Well yeah, those guys.”

…it typically costs about a quarter billion dollars to make a satellite and around the same amount to put it in space. That makes every satellite launch super high stakes, which makes companies risk-averse, so they tend to use older, proven technology and make sure to get at least 15 or more years of usage out of each one. The result is that a lot of the satellites performing services for us today were made in 1990, with 25-year-old technology.

…the Russian Deputy Prime Minister tweeted: After reviewing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest that the United States deliver their astronauts to the ISS using a trampoline. Well played. This is what happens when your once mighty space program becomes so lame that it can’t launch its own astronauts into space anymore. You have to rely on countries you might get mad at, which puts you in a terrible position.

Elon Musk chimed in with his own tweet soon after: Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on w @NASA. No trampoline needed…

Musk has said that his nightmare would be for SpaceX to end up in the hands of someone who will milk it for short-term profit. Because as we laid out at the beginning of this Phase 2 section, everything we just discussed is what SpaceX does—but not what SpaceX really does.

SpaceX’s low prices would still be classified as an incremental improvement—not a transformative game-changer. What SpaceX is really doing is something much, much bigger—they’re working on an innovation so groundbreaking that if they can pull it off, they’ll reduce the cost of launching a rocket by 100 times more and completely alter humanity’s future in space—and make a multi-planetary future possible.

No one in history—not the US, not the Soviets, and certainly not the stagnant fat cats at ULA—has figured out how to make rockets reusable. Rockets spend months getting built, head up to space, and either burn up in the atmosphere or crash into the ocean as scrap metal. It’s not that no one has tried—the US and Soviets have both put tens of billions of dollars into the problem—it’s that no one has figured it out.

Learning about what SpaceX is doing and why they’re doing it can take you from a place where thinking the prospect of humans moving to Mars is totally ludicrous to a place where you accept the logic that it’s actually an important thing to do and something that’s possible and even likely to happen. But that’s different than really believing it’ll happen.

Mars & The Future

For anyone under the age of 50 who’s annoyed they weren’t alive and sentient in 1969 to get caught up in the excitement of the moon landing—you’re finally going to have your day. Somewhere out there, right now on this Earth, is the Neil Armstrong of Mars. No one knows who they are—they might not even know who they are—but everyone on Earth will know their name soon. This is gonna be a big deal. In addition to being the first time a human has set foot on another planet, it’ll be by far the farthest away from Earth any human has ever gone.

There will need to be an oxygen-producing plant. Plentiful raw materials include atmospheric CO2 and ground H2O, so making oxygen won’t be that hard.

Farmers and botanists will be needed, along with fertilizer and a pressurized greenhouse.

And then, something will start to happen. The hardest part will be over, and more people will want to go. The first return ships will come back with people, and it’ll remind everyone on Earth that it doesn’t have to be a one-way ticket—and more people will want to go. The people who come back to Earth will be commended for their courage, some of the people on Mars will write best-selling books about their experience, and others will film a little TV show about the early settlement and become household names on Earth—and more people will want to go. People on Earth will see gorgeous photos of Martians hiking around on Olympus Mons and in Valles Marinaris, a mountain and canyon far bigger than any on Earth—and more people will want to go. People will hear about being able to jump off a 20-foot cliff without hurting yourself and watch viral YouTube clips of new kinds of extreme sports that can only be played with Mars’s 38% gravity situation—and more people will want to go.

When I hear a government saying, “Let’s not worry about going to Mars right now when we still have so many problems right here on Earth”—it sounds to me like a person saying, “I’ll worry about my health later when I don’t have so many bills to pay.” There will always, always be important problems to address on Earth, but if we allow what’s urgent here to prevent us from addressing what’s important in the big picture, we’re allowing ourselves to take a huge existential risk.

“Life has to be more than about solving problems. There have to be things that inspire you—that make you proud to be a member of humanity. The Apollo program is certainly an example of that. Only a handful of people went to the moon—and yet, actually we all went to the moon. We went with them vicariously. We shared in that adventure. I don’t think anyone would say that that was a bad idea, that that wasn’t great. We need more of those things—at least we need some of those things.”6 Space used to inspire everyone—that’s why so many children in 1970 wanted to be an astronaut.

”It seems unfathomable, but the rest of the space industry has made space boring.”