Elon Musk

by Ashlee Vance

  I reached out to Romney’s camp months later, as sales of Tesla’s soared, to see if he wanted to change his position but was rebuffed.

  15.As Tesla has grown in size, the company has commanded more respect from suppliers and been able to get better parts and better deals. But outsourcing components still bothers Musk, and for understandable reasons. When it tried to ramp up production in 2013, Tesla ran into periodic issues because of its suppliers. One of them made what should have been an inconsequential 12-volt lead acid battery that handled a few auxiliary functions in the car. Tesla bought the part from an American supplier, which in turn outsourced the part from a company in China, which in turn outsourced the part from a company in Vietnam. By the time the battery arrived at Tesla’s factories, it didn’t work, adding cost and delays during a crucial period in the Model S’s history. It’s situations like these that typically result in Tesla playing a much more active role with its suppliers when compared to other automakers. For something like an ABS braking controller, Tesla will work hand-in-hand with its supplier—in this case Bosch—to tune the hardware and software for the Model S’s specific characteristics. “Most companies just hand their cars over to Bosch, but Tesla goes in with a software engineer,” said Ali Javidan. “We had to change their mind-set and let them know we wanted to work on a very deep level.”

  16.Tesla does seem to promote an obsession with safety that’s unmatched in the industry. J. B. Straubel explained the company’s thinking as follows: “With the safety stuff, it seems like car companies have evolved to a place where their design objectives are set by whatever is regulated or has been standardized. The rule says, ‘Do this and nothing more.’ That is amazingly boring engineering. It leaves you maybe fiddling with the car’s shape or trying to make it a bit faster. We have more crumple zones, better deceleration, a lower center of gravity. We went in wondering, ‘Can we make this car twice as safe as anything else on the road?’”

  17.Othmer has lined up to be the lucky owner of the first Roadster II.

  Musk has developed an unconventional policy to determine the order in which cars are sold. When a new car is announced and its price is set, a race begins in which the first person to hand Musk a check gets the first car. With the Model S, Steve Jurvetson, a Tesla board member, had a check at the ready in his wallet and slid it across the table to Musk after spying details on the Model S in a packet of board meeting notes.

  Othmer caught a Wired story about a planned second version of the Roadster and emailed Musk right away. “He said, ‘Okay, I will sell it to you, but you have to pay two hundred thousand dollars right now.’” Othmer agreed, and Tesla had him come to the company’s headquarters on a Sunday to sign some paperwork, acknowledging the price of the car and the fact that the company didn’t quite know when it would arrive or what its specifications would be. “My guess is that it will be the fastest car on the road,” Othmer said. “It’ll be four-wheel drive. It’s going to be insane. And I don’t really think that will be the real price. I just don’t think Elon wanted me to buy it.”

  18.Musk suspected Better Place came up with battery swapping as a plan after its CEO, Shai Agassi, heard about the technology during a tour of the Tesla factory

  19.Musk had made a number of art cars over the years at Burning Man, including an electric one shaped like a rocket. In 2011, he also received a lot of grief from the Wall Street Journal for having a high-end camp. “Elon Musk, chief executive of electric-car maker Tesla Motors and co-founder of eBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, is among those eschewing the tent life,” the paper wrote. “He is paying for an elaborate compound consisting of eight recreational vehicles and trailers stocked with food, linens, groceries and other essentials for himself and his friends and family, say employees of the outfitter, Classic Adventures RV. . . . Classic is one of the festival’s few approved vendors. It charges $5,500 to $10,000 per RV for its Camp Classic Concierge packages like Mr. Musk’s. At Mr. Musk’s RV enclave, the help empties septic tanks, brings water and makes sure the vehicles’ electricity, refrigeration, air conditioning, televisions, DVD players and other systems are ship shape. The staff also stocked the campers with Diet Coke, Gatorade and Cruzan rum.” Once the story hit, Musk’s group felt like Classic Adventures had leaked the information to drum up business, and they tried to move to a new, undisclosed location.

  20.http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf.

  21.Tesla employees have been known to sneak across the street to the campus of the software maker SAP and to take advantage of its sumptuous, subsidized cafes.

  22.Shotwell talks about going to Mars as much as Musk and has dedicated her life to space exploration. Straubel has demonstrated the same type of commitment with electric vehicles and can sound a lot like Musk at times. “We are not trying to corner the market on EVs,” Straubel said. “There are 100 million cars built per year and 2 billion already out there. Even if we got to 5 or 10 percent of the market, that does not solve the world’s problems. I am bullish we will keep up with demand and drive the whole industry forward. Elon is committed to this.”

  23.Page presented one of his far-out ideas to me as follows: “I was thinking it would be pretty cool to have a prize to fund a project where someone would have to send something lightweight to the moon that could sort of replicate itself. I went over to the NASA operation center here at AMES in Mountain View when they were doing a mission and literally flying a satellite into the south pole of the moon. And they like hurled this thing into the moon at a high velocity and then it exploded and it sent matter out into space. And then they looked at that with telescopes, and they discovered water on the south pole of the moon, which sounds really exciting. I started thinking that if there’s a lot of water on the south pole of the moon, you can make rocket fuel from the hydrogen and oxygen. The other cool thing about the south pole is like it almost always gets sun. There’s like places high up that get sun and there’s places that are kind of in the craters that are very cold. So you have like a lot of energy then where you could run solar cells. You could almost run like a steam turbine there. You have rocket fuel ingredients, and you have solar cells that can be powered by sun, and you could probably run a power plant turbine. Power plant turbines aren’t that heavy. You could send that to the moon. You have like a gigawatt of power on the moon and make a lot of rocket fuel. It would make a good prize project. You send something to the moon that weights five pounds and have it make rocket fuel so that you could launch stuff off the moon or have it make a copy of itself, so that you can make more of them.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Author photograph © by Melinda Vance

  ASHLEE VANCE is one of the most prominent writers on technology today. After spending several years reporting on Silicon Valley and technology for the New York Times, Vance went to Bloomberg Businessweek, where he has written dozens of cover and feature stories for the magazine on topics ranging from cyber espionage to DNA sequencing and space exploration.

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  ALSO BY ASHLEE VANCE

  Geek Silicon Valley:

  The Inside Guide to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View,

  Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose, San Francisco

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  COVER DESIGN BY ALLISON SALTZMAN

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY ART STREIBER/AUGUST

  COPYRIGHT

  ELON MUSK. Copyright © 2015 by Ashlee Vance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  *Two years after the birth of his son, John Elon began to show signs of diabetes. The condition amounted to a death sentence at the time and, despite being only thirty-two, John Elon learned that he would likely have six months or so to live. With a bit of nursing experience behind her, Almeda took it upon herself to discover an elixir or treatment that would extend John Elon’s life. According to family lore, she hit on chiropractic procedures as an effective remedy, and John Elon lived for five years following the original diabetes diagnosis. The life-giving procedures established what would become an oddly rich chiropractic tradition in the Haldeman family. Almeda studied at a chiropractic school in Minneapolis and earned her doctor of chiropractic, or, D.C., degree in 1905. Musk’s great-grandmother went on to set up her own clinic and, as far as anyone can tell, became the first chiropractor to practice in Canada.

  *Haldeman also entered politics, trying to start his own political party in Saskatchewan, publishing a newsletter, and espousing conservative, antisocialist ideas. He would later make an unsuccessful run for Parliament and chair the Social Credit Party.

  *The journey took them up the African coast, across the Arabian Peninsula, all the way through Iran, India, and Malaysia and then down the Timor Sea to Australia. It required one year of preparation just to secure all of the necessary visas and paperwork, and they suffered from constant stomach bugs and an erratic schedule along the way. “Dad passed out crossing the Timor Sea, and mum had to take over until they hit Australia. He woke up right before they landed,” said Scott Haldeman. “It was fatigue.”

  *Both Joshua and Wyn were accomplished marksmen and won national shooting competitions. In the mid-1950s, they also tied for first place in the eight-thousand-mile Cape Town to Algiers Motor Rally, beating pros in their Ford station wagon.

  *Musk couldn’t remember this particular conversation. “I think they might be having creative recollection,” he said. “It’s possible. I had lots of esoteric conversations the last couple years of high school, but I was more concerned about general technology than banking.”

  *When Maye went to Canada to check out places to live, a fourteen-year-old Tosca seized the moment and put the family house in South Africa up for sale. “She had sold my car as well and was in the midst of putting our furniture up for sale, too,” Maye said. “When I got back, I asked her why. She said, ‘There is no need to delay. We are getting out of here.’”

  *The Musk brothers were not the most aggressive businessmen at this point. “I remember from their business plan that they were originally asking for a ten-thousand-dollar investment for twenty-five percent of their company,” said Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist. “That is a cheap deal! When I heard about the three-million-dollar investment, I wondered if Mohr Davidow had actually read the business plan. Somehow, the brothers ended up raising a normal venture round.”

  *Musk also got to show off the new office to his mother, Maye, and Justine. Maye sometimes sat in on meetings and came up with the idea of adding a “reverse directions” button on the Zip2 maps, which let people flip around their journeys and ended up becoming a popular feature on all mapping services.

  *At one point, the founders thought the easiest way to solve their problems would just be to buy a bank and revamp it. While that didn’t happen, they did snag a high-profile controller from Bank of America, who in turn explained, in painful detail, the complexities of sourcing loans, transferring money, and protecting accounts.

  *Fricker disputed that he yearned to be CEO, saying instead that the other employees had encouraged him to take over because of Musk’s struggles getting the business off the ground. Fricker and Musk, once close friends, remain unimpressed with each other. “Elon has his own code of ethics and honor and plays the game extraordinarily hard,” Fricker said. “When it comes down to it, for him, business is war.” According to Musk, “Harris is very smart, but I don’t think he has a good heart. He had a really intense desire to be running the show, and he wanted to take the company in ridiculous directions.” Fricker went on to have a very successful career as CEO of GMP Capital, a Canadian financial services company. Payne founded a private equity firm in Toronto.

  *Musk had been pushed out as CEO of X.com by the company’s investors, who wanted a more seasoned executive to lead the company toward an IPO. In December 1999, X.com hired Bill Harris, the former CEO of the financial software maker Intuit, as its new chief. After the merger, many in the company turned on Harris, he resigned, and Musk returned as the CEO.

  *After feeling ill for a few days, Musk went to Stanford Hospital and informed them that he’d been in a malaria zone, although the doctors could not find the parasite during tests. The doctors performed a spinal tap and diagnosed him with viral meningitis. “I may very well have also had that, and they treated me for it, and it did get better,” Musk said. The doctors discharged Musk from the hospital and warned him that some symptoms would recur. “I started feeling bad a few days later, and it got progressively worse,” Musk said. “Eventually, I couldn’t walk. It was like, ‘Okay, this is even worse than the first time.’” Justine took Musk to a general practitioner in a cab, and he lay on the floor of the doctor’s office. “I was so dehydrated that she couldn’t take my vitals,” Musk said. The doctor called an ambulance, which transported Musk to Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City with IVs in both arms. Musk faced another misdiagnosis—this time of the type of malaria. The doctors declined to give Musk a more aggressive treatment that came with nasty side effects including heart palpitations and organ failure.

  *When Zubrin and some of the other Mars buffs heard of Musk’s plant project, they were upset. “It didn’t make any sense,” Zubrin said. “It was a purely symbolic thing to do, and the second they opened that door, millions of microbes would escape and plague all of NASA’s contamination protocols.”

  *Most of the stories written about Musk that touch on this period say he went to Moscow three times. According to Cantrell’s detailed records, this is not the case. Musk met with the Russians twice in Moscow, and once in Pasadena, California. He also met with Arianespace in Paris, and in London with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., which Musk considered buying.

  *Buzza knew Hollman’s work at Boeing and coaxed him to SpaceX about six months after the company started.

  *Including a 1,300-pound hunk of copper.

  *Before returning to El Segundo, Hollman used a drill press to remove the glasses’ safety shield. “I didn’t want to look like a nerd on the flight home,” he said.

  *Hollman left the company after this incident in November 2007 and then returned for a spell to train new personnel. A number of people I interviewed for the book said that Hollman was so key to SpaceX’s early days that they feared the company might flame out without him.

  *In a press release announcing the funding round, Mu
sk was not listed as a founder of the company. In the “About Tesla Motors” section, the company stated, “Tesla Motors was founded in June 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to create efficient electric cars for people who love to drive.” Musk and Eberhard would later spar over Musk’s founder status.

  *This was how the employee remembered the text. I did not see the actual e-mail. Musk later told the same employee, “I want you to think ahead and think so hard every day that your head hurts. I want your head to hurt every night when you go to bed.”

  *Musk fought to set the record straight, as he saw it, on the Huffington Post and wrote a 1,500-word essay. Musk maintained that two months of negotiations with independent parties had gone into the postnuptial agreement, which kept the couple’s assets separate so that Musk could get the spoils from his companies and Justine could get the spoils from her books. “In mid 1999, Justine told me that if I proposed to her, she would say yes,” Musk wrote. “Since this was not long after the sale of my first company, Zip2, to Compaq, and the subsequent cofounding of PayPal, friends and family advised me to separate whether the marriage was for love or money.” After the settlement, Musk asked Arianna Huffington to remove his essay about the divorce from her website. “I don’t want to dwell on past negativity,” Musk said. “You can always find things on the Internet. So it’s not like it’s gone. It’s just not easily found.”

  *The pair have continued to have their difficulties. For a long time, Musk ran all of the child-sharing scheduling through his assistant Mary Beth Brown rather than dealing directly with Justine. “I was really pissed-off about that,” Justine said. And the time Justine cried the most during our conversation came as she weighed the pros and cons of the children growing up on a grand stage where they’re whisked away to the Super Bowl or Spain in a private jet on a moment’s notice or asked to play at the Tesla factory. “I know the kids really look up to him,” she said. “He takes them everywhere and provides a lot of experiences for them. My role as the mother is to create this reality where I provide a sense of normalcy. They are not growing up in a normal family with a normal dad. Their life with me is a lot more low-key. We value different things. I am a lot more about empathy.”