Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases.

The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded. Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed. He was able to hitch a ride up to the Sequoia offices. Musk, also unhurt, stayed behind for a half-hour to have his car towed away, then joined the meeting without telling Harris what had happened. Later, Musk was able to laugh and say, “At least it showed Peter I was unafraid of risks.” Says Thiel, “Yeah, I realized he was a bit crazy.”

“Elon will say crazy stuff, but every once in a while, he’ll surprise you by knowing way more than you do about your own specialty. I think a huge part of the way he motivates people are these displays of sharpness, which people just don’t expect from him, because they mistake him for a bullshitter or goofball.”

When the board voted to remove Musk as CEO, he responded with a calm and grace that surprised those who had watched his feverish struggle to prevail.

“I don’t want to have my honor impugned,” he shouted. “My honor is worth more than this company to me.” Thiel was baffled about why this was a matter of honor. “He was very dramatic,” Thiel recalls. “People don’t usually talk with such a superheroic, almost Homeric kind of vibe in Silicon Valley.” Musk remained the largest shareholder and a member of the board, but Thiel barred him from speaking for the company.

Musk was sincere. He sat on the curb looking sad and asked Levchin, “Why did you turn on me?” “I honestly believed it was the right thing to do,” Levchin replied. “You were completely wrong, the company was about to die, and I felt I had no other choice.” Musk nodded. A few months later, they had dinner in Palo Alto. “Life’s too short,” Musk told him. “Let’s move on.” He did the same with Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and some of the other coup leaders.

“I was pretty angry at first,” Musk told me in the summer of 2022. “I had thoughts of assassination running through my head. But eventually I realized that it was good I got couped. Otherwise I’d still be slaving away at PayPal.” Then he paused for a few moments and let out a little laugh. “Of course, if I had stayed, PayPal would be a trillion-dollar company.”

“He was actually only hours from death,” the executive wrote in an email to Thiel and Levchin. “His doctor had treated two cases of falciparum malaria prior to treating Elon—both patients died.”

Musk remained in intensive care for ten days, and he did not fully recover for five months. He took two lessons from his near-death experience: “Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to destroy me.”

“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.”

“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.”

It was fortunate that the meetings went badly. It prodded Musk to think bigger. Rather than merely using a secondhand rocket to put a demonstration greenhouse on Mars, he would conceive a venture that was far more audacious, one of the most audacious of our times: privately building rockets that could launch satellites and then humans into orbit and eventually send them to Mars and beyond. “I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”

“idiot index,” which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques. Rockets had an extremely high idiot index.

When they finally made the decision to turn off the breathing machine, Elon felt his last heartbeat and Justine held him in her arms and felt his death rattle. Musk sobbed uncontrollably. “He cried like a wolf,” his mother says. “Cried like a wolf.”

“He shuts down emotions when in dark places,” she says. “I think it’s a survival thing with him.”

Errol’s wife, who was nineteen years younger than he, began deferring to Elon. “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me,” Errol says, “and so it became a problematic situation.”

Mueller, who had been complaining about the risk-averse culture at TRW, consulted with his wife. “You’ll kick yourself if you don’t do this,” she told him. Mueller thus became SpaceX’s first hire.

If you’re unwilling to invest in a company, he felt, you shouldn’t qualify as a founder. “You cannot ask for two years of salary in escrow and consider yourself a cofounder,” he says. “There’s got to be some combination of inspiration, perspiration, and risk to be a cofounder.”

As his team grew, Musk infused it with his tolerance for risk and reality-bending willfulness. “If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.” It was a good way to drive people to do what they thought was impossible. But it was also a good way to become surrounded by people afraid to give you bad news or question a decision.

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

“Then when I ask for something, you fucking give it to me.”

“I learned never to tell him no,” Mueller says. “Just say you’re going to try, then later explain why if it doesn’t work out.”

“A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle,”

“If you set an aggressive schedule that people think they might be able to make, they will try to put out extra effort,” he says. “But if you give them a schedule that’s physically impossible, engineers aren’t stupid. You’ve demoralized them. It’s Elon’s biggest weakness.”

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

companies that had gone bankrupt. He described Beal’s abandoned test site outside of McGregor, Texas, about twenty-six miles east of Waco, and gave them the cell number of a former employee who still lived in the area. Musk decided they should fly there that day.

Musk does not naturally partner with people, either personally or professionally. At Zip2 and PayPal, he showed he could inspire, frighten, and sometimes bully colleagues. But collegiality was not part of his skill set and deference not in his nature. He does not like to share power.

But in February 2004, the exchange grew testy when NASA awarded a $227 million contract, without competitive bidding, to a rival private rocket company, Kistler Aerospace. The contract was for rockets that could resupply the International Space Station, something that Musk (rightly, as it turned out) thought SpaceX could do.

what they did was wrong and corrupt, so I sued.” He even threw Sarsfield, his strongest advocate within NASA, under the bus by including in the lawsuit his friendly email explaining that the contract was meant to be a lifeline for Kistler. SpaceX ended up winning the dispute, and NASA was ordered to open the project to competitive bidding. SpaceX was able to win a significant portion of it. “That was a huge upset—literally imagine, like, a ten-to-one odds underdog winning,” Musk told the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport. “It blew everyone’s mind.”

“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.”

This outcomes-based, fixed-price contracting allowed the private company to control, within broad parameters, how its rockets were designed and built. There was a lot of money to be made if it built a cost-efficient rocket that succeeded, and a lot of money to be lost if it failed. “It rewards results rather than waste,” Musk says.

Tarpenning, they agreed that Musk would lead the initial financing round with a $6.4 million investment and become chair of the board. What struck Tarpenning was that Musk focused on the importance of the mission rather than the potential of the business: “He clearly had already come to the conclusion that to have a sustainable future we had to electrify cars.”

The pieces thus came together for what would become the world’s most valuable and transformative automobile company: Eberhard as CEO, Tarpenning as president, Straubel as chief technology officer, Wright as chief operating officer, and Musk as the chair of the board and primary funder. Years later, after many bitter disputes and a lawsuit, they agreed that all five of them would be called cofounders.

One of the most important decisions that Elon Musk made about Tesla—the defining imprint that led to its success and its impact on the auto industry—was that it should make its own key components, rather than piecing together a car with hundreds of components from independent suppliers.

In a decision that would come to haunt Tesla, Eberhard decided that Tesla would get batteries in Asia and car bodies in England and drivetrains from AC Propulsion and a transmission from Detroit or Germany. This was in line with the prevailing trends in the auto industry.

From 1970 to 2010, they went from producing 90 percent of the intellectual property in their vehicles to about 50 percent. That made them dependent on far-flung supply chains.

Tesla’s leadership team thus became an inherently unstable molecule.

By modifying so many elements, Tesla lost the cost advantages that came from simply using a crash-tested Lotus Elise body. It also added to the supply-chain complexity.

“They kept asking me why I was being so hardcore about every little curve of this car. And what I told them was, ‘Because we have to make it beautiful.’ ”

One constant was his sensitivity about getting credit. His blood boiled if anyone falsely implied that he had succeeded because of inherited wealth or claimed that he didn’t deserve to be called a founder of one of the companies he helped to start.

The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.

“You can’t manufacture a product without a bill of materials,” Watkins told him. “There are tens of thousands of components on a vehicle, and you are getting pecked to death by ducks.”

Watkins and Gracias presented the grim findings to Musk. The cash-sucking supply chain and the cost of the car would bleed the company of all its money—including the deposits that had been made by customers to reserve a Roadster—before it could even begin selling the car at scale. “It was,” Watkins says, “an oh-shit moment.”

Gracias pulled Musk aside later. “This is not going to work,” he said. “Eberhard is not being for real about the numbers.”

There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s headspace. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one. But somewhat oddly, Martin Eberhard, who is hardly a household name, is second. “Getting involved with Eberhard was the worst mistake I ever made in my career,” Musk says.

“That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said at a couple of meetings. That was a line that Steve Jobs used often. So did Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Their brutal honesty could be unnerving, even offensive. It could constrict rather than encourage honest dialogue. But it was also effective, at times, in creating what Jobs called a team of A players who didn’t want to be around fuzzy thinkers.

wrestles with the core question about Musk: whether his bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that made him successful.

“Maybe if the price the world pays for this kind of accomplishment is a real asshole doing it, well, it’s probably a price worth paying.

They had begun the marriage living together in a small apartment in Silicon Valley they shared with three roommates and a miniature dachshund who was not housebroken, Justine recalls, and now they were living in a six-thousand-square-foot mansion in the Bel Air hills section of Los Angeles with five quirky boys, a staff of five nannies and housekeepers, and a miniature dachshund who still was not housebroken.