Musk now had a serious nest egg he could use in his pursuit of changing the world. One unusual possibility had begun to take shape in his mind. Musk had been very disturbed to discover that NASA had no intentions of going to Mars, and he began to ponder what it would take. The major problem was not one of technological feasibility, he concluded, but rather expense. Rockets could get into orbit, but they were expensive and typically not reusable. In a comparison he would often make, this was like throwing away your Boeing 747 after every flight across the Atlantic. It made space travel ludicrously impractical. In a move that evinces a man with a spectacular sense of self-efficacy, Musk decided to pick up where NASA had left off. He began to study rocket science texts such as Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion. He then traveled to Russia to see if he could obtain an affordable rocket upon which to base his plans, but the Russians sent him away, telling him his plan was impossible. Undaunted, he came up with his own preliminary design for an affordable rocket.17 Investing $100 million of his own funds, he founded a company in June 2002 called Space Exploration (SpaceX) and began developing a method that would streamline the production of rockets that could be used more than once. If NASA was not going to bring humanity to Mars, Musk would do it himself.
The interest in colonizing Mars was part of an even grander mission to save the world. Musk was worried about the limits of finite resources on Earth. It was clear to him that humanity was at risk of extinction if we didn’t come up with better ways to produce, use, and conserve energy. Mars was the backup plan—by creating colonies on other planets, it would increase the likelihood of survival of the human species if we ended up destroying our home planet. Only a person with an astonishing sense of self-efficacy and a keenly idealistic nature would decide to personally take on the job of saving humanity from its own destruction. Musk began to contemplate ways to improve both energy production and consumption. To address energy production, he sketched out a business plan for a company that would accelerate the installation of solar panels on homes. He proposed this plan to his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, and agreed to fund the start-up personally. This company launched in 2006 as Solar City.
To reduce energy consumption, Musk decided to develop an electric car. He planned to base his car on one that had been created by Al Cocconi, founder of AC Propulsion and one of the original engineers of GM’s ill-fated EV1. GM had launched the EV1 in 1996 as an experiment in the feasibility of producing and marketing an electric car. GM did not actually sell any EV1s, only making them available through leases. After three years, GM concluded that the cars would not be profitable and ended their production, and by 2002 GM had recalled almost all of the cars and had them crushed (about forty were sent to museums). After the EV1 program was discontinued, Cocconi developed an electric sports car by incorporating an electric drivetrain into a Piontech Sportech fiberglass kit car.18 The result was the tzero—a two-hundred-horsepower electric vehicle with the styling of a race car that could accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in a heart-pounding 3.7 seconds. The moment Musk drove it, he knew it had potential to reinvent people’s perception of the electric car.
Another engineer and entrepreneur, Martin Eberhard, had already approached Cocconi with the idea to substitute the tzero’s heavy lead acid batteries with much lighter lithium ion batteries. A tall, slim man with a mop of gray hair, Eberhard was a serial entrepreneur who had launched a number of start-ups. Now, with concerns about global warming and the US dependence on the Middle East for oil, he was looking to build a sports car that would be environmentally friendly. Tom Gage, then AC Propulsion’s CEO, suggested that Eberhard and Musk collaborate. Both Eberhard and Musk believed that for an electric car to be successful, it had to be sexy and fast. Soon they had agreed upon a plan, and in February 2004 Musk committed $6.3 million to fund a project to build a new kind of electric vehicle, the sleek and powerful Tesla Roadster. Musk would be the company’s chairman and Eberhard its CEO.
The two men worked well together at first, but soon personality clashes began to emerge. Both men were technically savvy and opinionated about the design of the car and the running of the company. Eberhard could be abrasive and critical. Musk, in turn, was not content to just financially back the company. He began to get intimately involved in decisions about the car’s design and the operation of the company. The conflicts began to multiply. For example, Eberhard preferred to stick with the fiberglass body panels used in the original Lotus Elise car body upon which the Roadster was based; Musk wanted to use the lighter, stronger—and more expensive—carbon fiber. Eberhard hired public relations agents to hype the car before its launch; Musk fired them, believing his own involvement and the car itself would generate enough publicity. Eberhard wanted to save money by using the Elise’s original crash-tested, off-the-rack chassis; Musk wanted to lower the doorsills by two inches to make the car easier to enter and exit. Musk also wanted to redesign the headlights and door latches, and replace the Elise’s seats with more comfortable—and again, more expensive—custom seats.19 In each case, Musk prevailed. His views were hard to ignore given that, by 2007, he had put $55 million of his own money into the company and had also raised money from wealthy friends, including eBay’s second employee, Jeff Skoll, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. In 2007 tensions reached a head, and Eberhard was ousted from the company.
Numerous production delays and cost overruns plagued the project, but in July 2008, when the first seven Roadsters—the “Founder’s Series”—hit the road, the production problems were forgotten. The car had four hundred volts of electric potential, liquid-cooled lithium ion batteries, and a series of silicon transistors that gave the car acceleration so powerful the driver was pressed back against the seat.20 It was about as fast as a Porsche 911 Turbo, did not create a single emission, and got about 220 miles on a single charge.21
Nearly all of the early reviews were effusive. As the online auto review site Autoguide.com reported, “The Tesla Roadster 2.5 S is a massively impressive vehicle, more spacecraft than sports car. Theories like global warming, peak oil and rising oil prices should no longer bring heart palpitations to car fans. The Tesla shows just how good zero-emissions ‘green’ technology can be. Quite frankly, getting into a normal car at the end of the test drive was a major letdown.”22 Motortrend called the acceleration “breathtaking”; Automobile Magazine editor Jason Cammisa said the Roadster “explodes off the line, pulling like a small jet plane.… It’s like driving a Lamborghini with a big V-12 revved over 6000 rpm at all times, waiting to pounce—without the noise, vibration, or misdemeanor arrest for disturbing the peace.”23
Although the car was a huge technological success and attracted considerable attention from the public, it was incredibly expensive to produce, and the company posted an $82 million loss for the year. Furthermore, to really have an impact on energy consumption, Tesla Motors would need to produce a car for the mass market—not just the luxury niche—and that meant it would also have to find a way to overcome the huge challenge of ensuring that enough charging stations were available. Without a robust network of charging stations, the mass market could not be induced to buy.
To make matters worse, SpaceX’s first three rocket launches had failed, putting yet another company of the Musk business empire in crisis. In 2008, at the age of thirty-seven, Musk was in debt and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He was also embroiled in a divorce from his first wife, Justine Wilson. Antonio Gracias, chief executive officer of Valor Equity Partners, a friend of Musk and an investor in both Tesla and SpaceX, became deeply impressed by Musk’s strength and resolve during this time: “He has this ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met. What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn’t just survive. He kept working and stayed focused.” He adds, “Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray. Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrati
onal. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy. I’ve just never seen anything like his ability to take pain.”24
Fortunately, in September 2008 SpaceX’s fourth launch of its Falcon 1 rocket went flawlessly and landed SpaceX a $1.5 billion contract from NASA to service the space station. Musk and his team were elated; many (including Musk) fought back tears. SpaceX had become the first purely commercial from-the-ground-up development to have a space vehicle reach orbit. As Scott Pelley, anchor of CBS Evening News, said in 2014, “Only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back: the United States, Russia, China, and Elon Musk.”25
Musk was now the CEO of two companies (SpaceX and Tesla) and chairman of a third (Solar City). Musk must have understood how unusual both his intellectual abilities and strength of will were, because when pressed about whether he could find someone else to act as CEO at SpaceX, he replied, “This may be presumptuous, but I have not met anyone who could do this.… Well wait, that’s not true. Jeff Bezos could do this. Larry Page could do this. Bill Gates could do this. But there’s just a really small list of people with the sufficient technical and business ability to do this job.”26
The years to follow brought more success. Tesla’s next car, the Model S, was rated by Consumer Reports as the best car it had ever reviewed. The Model X—a luxury sports utility vehicle—also received high marks, and by the end of 2017 the market was eagerly awaiting the Model 3, which promised to be the first truly affordable Tesla automobile. Musk also expanded the company’s product scope by building a massive factory that would produce batteries for automobiles (the Gigafactory, built in Nevada) and by launching a line of “Powerwall” batteries that people could use to store electricity generated by solar power in their homes. Tesla Motors still had not turned a profit, but it had survived its infancy, appeared to be solvent, and was meeting its sales objectives. It was also competing against companies with far greater scale. As noted by John O’Dell, senior editor at auto information site Edmunds.com, “A lot of people have been very, very skeptical… when you want to be an automaker, you are competing with multibillion-dollar conglomerates.… It’s entrepreneurism on steroids.… They had a huge learning curve but they’ve powered through it.” Theo O’Neill, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities, added that “It’s going to prove everybody in Detroit wrong.… They all say what Tesla is doing isn’t possible.”27 SpaceX was also making history: in March 2017 it successfully launched a reused Falcon 9 rocket into orbit, and minutes later the first stage of the rocket made a controlled landing back on a drone ship in the Atlantic while an ecstatic audience cheered.28 Musk had achieved what the space industry had repeatedly said was impossible.
Musk’s aspirations and victories were larger than life. J. B. Straubel, one of the men who helped design the Tesla, characterized it this way: “Elon drives this think-bigger mentality.… As engineers we tend to want to keep things small, but Elon is always imagining something so large it’s terrifying, and he’s incredibly demanding and hard-driving.”29 While giving a speech at the famous annual film, media, and music conference South by Southwest, Google’s Astro Teller called Elon Musk a “national treasure” and then stated, “It’s not just that he’s built some exciting and really meaningful, positive things… that’s great. But he’s like a walking moonshot. He’s so audacious. It seems limitless.” Teller then added, “It’s his bravery and creativity that make him exceptional.”30 John Seely Brown, a scholar of innovation and former chief scientist at Xerox, added, “When I first heard about the space stuff, I said, ‘By God, this guy is crazy.…’ But that’s the point.”31
As Kimbal Musk observed, his brother is “a guy with unlimited ambition. His mind needs to be constantly fulfilled. The problems that he takes on therefore need to be more and more complex over time to keep him interested.”32 Friends and colleagues describe him as “Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller, and Howard Hughes, rolled into one,”33 and the director Jon Favreau has openly declared that he modeled his version of the playboy-rocket-scientist-action-hero Tony Stark in his Iron Man movies on Musk. While observers are likely to describe Musk’s achievements with amazement and hyperbole, for his own part Musk tends to be coolly confident and focused on the problems he still wants to solve: to create truly sustainable energy production and to make humans an interplanetary species. Max Levchin, who cofounded PayPal with Musk, says, “He is very much the person who, when someone says it’s impossible, shrugs and says, ‘I think I can do it.’”34 That “I think I can do it” is key—Musk’s gut-level faith in his ability to achieve any goal and overcome any obstacle is one of the most important aspects of his character that has made him a larger-than-life innovator. He takes on enormous challenges and sticks with them no matter how hard they become because he knows he will usually succeed. In Musk we can see very clearly that exceptional self-efficacy gives rise to bigger ideas and fuels greater tenacity in pursuing them.
How High Self-Efficacy Works
SELF-EFFICACY IS A FORM of task-specific self-confidence, such as a person’s faith in her ability to solve particular kinds of problems and achieve particular kinds of objectives. A person with high self-efficacy with respect to her reasoning and judgment will have great faith in her ability to assess the nature of a problem and the utility or feasibility of a solution. This, in turn, can empower her to believe in an idea even if others do not—she trusts her own judgment and doesn’t expect others to always be able to follow her reasoning. After all, one of the ways that she may have acquired this self-efficacy is by having early experiences where she discovered that she was smarter, or more creative, than those around her. When Elon Musk witnessed people’s surprise at his comprehension and recall of facts from the encyclopedia, for example, he was learning both about his own capabilities and the fact that others might not always be able to keep up. Steve Jobs learned a similar lesson when he realized as a teenager that he was smarter than his parents. Marie Curie discovered at the tender age of five that she was reading well ahead of her older siblings, and the shock of her parents at this discovery made her burst into tears, fearing she had done something wrong. Albert Einstein must have realized he had a gift for math when his skills as a young boy quickly passed those of his college-age tutor. Nikola Tesla also had many such moments, although the most definitive would arrive when he realized that he had proven his college professors wrong about producing electricity without a commutator (this is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3).
Exceptionally high self-efficacy does not guarantee a person will engage in nonconforming thinking and behavior, but it does increase the likelihood: a person who believes she knows better than the crowd is less likely to bow to the crowd’s will. Many people who come up with an unusual idea will doubt themselves and may abandon their idea at the first sign of criticism. They will assume that if their idea were good, it would face less opposition or would already be implemented. The very unusualness of their idea is a signal that it is not likely to be a good idea. But a person with high self-efficacy doesn’t interpret unusualness as a negative signal because she has faith in her own ability to assess the merit of the idea, and she doesn’t always expect others to “get it.”
Self-efficacy also mediates the relationship between idea and action: a person is much more likely to take on a task that she believes she will be successful in achieving. Because she believes she can achieve what she takes on, she may exert more effort toward a task and persist in the face of obstacles or failure.35 Initial difficulties or setbacks are not signals to her that she will not succeed; they are just prompts for her to dig in harder until she has mastered her objective. For example, although Marie Curie tended to be self-deprecating, Barbara Goldsmith notes that “At twenty-three Manya’s [Marie’s] character had been formed. She had learned that if she had enough patience and tenacity, the seemingly
impossible could be accomplished.”36 Eve Curie described her mother’s tenacity with the following: “Her brain was so precise, her intelligence so marvelously clear.… She was supported by a will of iron, by a maniacal taste for perfection, and by an incredible stubbornness. Systematically, patiently, she attained each of the ends she had set for herself: she passed first in the master’s examination in physics in 1893, and second in the master’s in mathematics in 1894.”37 We can see Marie Curie’s belief in the ability of the individual to overcome all obstacles, and the importance of persevering, expressed in her own words in a letter to her brother: “I want you to pass your doctor’s thesis.… It seems that life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”38 Curie’s perseverance, as discussed further in Chapters 4 and 6, was so extreme that she would often work to the point of exhaustion, and on more than one occasion she fainted in her laboratory for lack of food and rest.
Thomas Edison’s self-efficacy is also exhibited in his dogged perseverance. Edison is renowned for trying thousands of different filaments in his objective of creating a long-lived light bulb—beginning with platinum but then turning to cotton threads, different kinds of paper and cardboard, various woods, and even horsehair. As he described it in his own words, “I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty, as perhaps you know, was in constructing the carbon filament, the incandescence of which is the source of the light. Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials were used, until finally the shred of bamboo now utilized was settled upon.”39 Edison’s friend Walter S. Mallory recounts a similar story about Edison’s development of a storage battery.
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