Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

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

After her divorce, Maye began dating another abusive man. The children hated him and would occasionally put tiny firecrackers in his cigarettes that would explode when he lit up.

The difficulty of getting traveler’s checks replaced (it took weeks) was an early taste of how the financial payments system needed disruption.

He decided to major in physics because, like his father, he was drawn to engineering. The essence of being an engineer, he felt, was to address any problem by drilling down to the most fundamental tenets of physics.

He had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.”

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

But he learned a lesson. “I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.”

“I thought the soul patch was a dead giveaway that the guy was a douche,” says Musk.

“What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially,” he says. “That’s what makes him a force of nature.”

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

“People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves,” he would say in a TED Talk a few years later. “It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”

“To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult, and people will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States. But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.” Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.”

Its goal, he said in an early presentation, was to launch its first rocket by September 2003 and to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2010. Thus continued the tradition he had established at PayPal: setting unrealistic timelines that transformed his wild notions from being completely insane to being merely very late.

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

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

Because SpaceX was a private company, and because Musk was willing to flout rules, it could take the risks it wanted. Buzza and Mueller pushed their engines until they broke, and then said, “Okay, now we know what the limits are.”

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

SpaceX pioneered an alternative in which private companies bid on performing a specific task or mission, such as launching government payloads into orbit. The company risked its own capital, and it would be paid only if and when it delivered on certain milestones.

Over the years, Musk was able to use techniques learned at SpaceX and apply them to Tesla, and vice versa.

This did not sit well with Musk, who was instilling a culture based on questioning every rule and assuming that every requirement was dumb until proven otherwise.

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

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

“The strong will and emotional distance that makes him difficult as a husband,” Justine concedes, “may be reasons for his success in running a business.”

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

What Tesla did get in June 2009 was $465 million in interest-bearing loans from a Department of Energy program. The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program lent money to companies to make electric or fuel-efficient cars. Ford, Nissan, and Fisker Automotive also got loans.

So the first check did not come until early 2010. Three years later, Tesla repaid its loan along with $12 million interest. Nissan repaid in 2017, Fisker went bankrupt, and as of 2023 Ford still owed the money.

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

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

Decades of cost-plus contracts had made aerospace flabby. A valve in a rocket would cost thirty times more than a similar valve in a car, so Musk constantly pressed his team to source components from non-aerospace companies. The latches used by NASA in the Space Station cost $1,500 each. A SpaceX engineer was able to modify a latch used in a bathroom stall and create a locking mechanism that cost $30.

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

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

Beginning with the theology of globalization in the 1980s, and relentlessly driven by cost-cutting CEOs and their activist investors, American companies shut down domestic factories and offshored manufacturing. The trend accelerated in the early 2000s, when Tesla was getting started. Between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs. By sending their factories abroad, American companies saved labor costs, but they lost the daily feel for ways to improve their products.

He believed that designing the factory to build a car—“the machine that builds the machine”—was as important as designing the car itself. Tesla’s design-manufacturing feedback loop gave it a competitive advantage, allowing it to innovate on a daily basis.

“Steve just had to get the conception and software right, but the manufacturing was outsourced,” Ellison says. “Elon took on the manufacturing, the materials, the huge factories.” Jobs loved to walk through Apple’s design studio on a daily basis, but he never visited his factories in China. Musk, in contrast, spent more time walking assembly lines than he did walking around the design studio. “The brain strain of designing the car is tiny compared to the brain strain of designing the factory,” he says.

Bezos applauded, but at that moment he was quietly pursuing an unexpected attack. He and Blue Origin had applied for a U.S. patent titled “Sea landing of space launch vehicles,” and a few weeks after the dinner it was granted. The ten-page application described “methods for landing and recovering a booster stage and/or other portions thereof on a platform at sea.” Musk was livid. The idea of landing on ships at sea “is something that’s been discussed for, like, half a century,” he said. “It’s in fictional movies; it’s in multiple proposals; there’s so much prior art, it’s crazy. So, trying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.”

A few times Juncosa pushed back, saying it would present challenges with valves and leaks, but Musk was unrelenting. “There is no first-principles reason this can’t work,” he said. “It’s extraordinarily difficult, I know, but you just have to muscle through.”

The production lines often halted when safety sensors were triggered. Musk decided they were too sensitive, tripping when there was no real problem. He tested some of them to see if something small like a piece of paper falling past the sensor could trigger a stoppage. This led to a crusade to weed out sensors in both Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets. “Unless a sensor is absolutely needed to start an engine or safely stop an engine before it explodes, it must be deleted,” he wrote in an email to SpaceX engineers. “Going forward, anyone who puts a sensor (or anything) on the engine that isn’t obviously critical will be asked to leave.”

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Then make the requirements less dumb.

2. Delete any part or process you can.

3. Simplify and optimize.

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5. Automate. That comes last.

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