Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

“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.”

we had known each other for about two weeks and were now engaged.”

“I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that,” says Dolly Singh, the human resources director. “Within moments, the energy of the building went from despair and defeat to a massive buzz of determination.”

“Optimism, pessimism, fuck that,” Musk answered. “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”

Sometimes he would go to the bathroom and start vomiting. “It would go to his gut, and he would be screaming and retching,” she says. “I would stand by the toilet and hold his head.”

“For me emotionally, this was like, you got two kids and you’re running out of food,” he says. “You can give half to each kid, in which case they might both die, or give all the food to one kid and increase the chance that at least one kid survives. I couldn’t bring myself to decide that one was going to die, so I decided I had to give my all to save both.”

The investment was announced on August 3, 2008, just after the third launch attempt failed. It served as a lifeline that allowed Musk to declare that he was going to fund a fourth launch.

Tim Buzza, SpaceX’s launch director, told Musk that the only way to meet his deadline would be to charter a C-17 transport plane from the Air Force. “Well, then, just do it,” Musk replied. That’s when Buzza knew that Musk was willing to put all his chips on the table.

Finally, nine minutes after liftoff, the Kestrel engine cut off as planned and its payload was released into orbit. By now the cheers were deafening, and Musk was pumping his arms into the air. Kimbal, standing next to him, started to cry.

Tesla did not apply for any TARP or stimulus package money. 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.

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.

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.

Over the next decade, relying mainly on SpaceX, the U.S. would send more astronauts, satellites, and cargo to space than any other country.

The next big test, scheduled for later in 2010, was to show that SpaceX could not only launch an unmanned capsule into orbit but also return it to Earth safely. No private company had done that. In fact, only three governments had: the United States, Russia, and China.

“What if we just cut the skirt?” Musk asked his team. “Like, literally cut around it?” In other words, why not just trim off a tiny bit of the bottom that had the two cracks?

“Being with me can be difficult,” he told her. “This will be a hard path.” She decided to go along for the ride. “Okay,” she told him one day. “I can take a hard path.”

Musk did not have many stable and grounded relationships, nor did he have many stable and grounded periods in his life. No doubt those two things were related. Among his few such relationships was the one he had with Riley, and the years he would spend with her—from their meeting in 2008 to their second divorce in 2016—would end up being the longest stretch of relative stability in his life. If he had liked stability more than storm and drama, she would have been perfect for him.

By sending their factories abroad, American companies saved labor costs, but they lost the daily feel for ways to improve their products. Musk bucked this trend, largely because he wanted to have tight control of the manufacturing process. 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.

Jobs and Musk. He said they both had beneficial cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did,” he says. What set them apart is that Musk, unlike Jobs, applied that obsession not just to the design of a product but also to the underlying science, engineering, and manufacturing. “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.”

“Fuck oil,” he said. Tesla was almost dead at the end of 2008. Now, just eighteen months later, it had become America’s hottest new company.

“Elon can be so much hell and brimstone in meetings and just unpredictable as all get out,” he says. “But I’ve also seen him flip a switch and suddenly be this incredibly effective, charismatic, high-emotional-intelligence business person, when he has to do it.”

“He’s a person who’s all over the map, and you don’t know what he’s going to say or do. And then, all of a sudden, he pulls it all together.”

They met in 2004 when Bezos accepted Musk’s invitation to take a tour of SpaceX. Afterward, he was surprised to get a somewhat curt email from Musk expressing annoyance that Bezos had not reciprocated by inviting him to Seattle to see Blue Origin’s factory, so Bezos promptly did.

Musk asked Bezos to have Amazon do a review of Justine’s new book, an urban horror thriller about demon-human hybrids. Bezos explained that he did not tell Amazon what to review, but said that he would personally post a customer review. Musk sent back a brusque reply, but Bezos posted a nice personal review anyway.

When NASA ended up awarding the lease to SpaceX, Bezos sued. Musk was furious, declaring that it was ridiculous for Blue Origin to contest the lease “when they haven’t even gotten so much as a toothpick to orbit.”

The dinner featured dishes designed to appeal to the overly adventurous, such as scorpions, maggot-covered strawberries, sweet-and-sour cow penis,

At Musk’s 2013 birthday party in Napa Valley, they got into a passionate debate in front of the other guests, including Luke Nosek and Reid Hoffman. Musk argued that unless we built in safeguards, artificial intelligence systems might replace humans, making our species irrelevant or even extinct. Page pushed back. Why would it matter, he asked, if machines someday surpassed humans in intelligence, even consciousness? It would simply be the next stage of evolution.

One question they discussed at dinner was what would be safer: a small number of AI systems that were controlled by big corporations or a large number of independent systems? They concluded that a large number of competing systems, providing checks and balances on each other, was better. Just as humans work collectively to stop evil actors, so too would a large collection of independent AI bots work to stop bad bots. For Musk, this was the reason to make OpenAI truly open,

Musk became increasingly frustrated with the company’s practices, especially the way it relied on an aggressive sales force that was compensated by commissions. “Their sales tactics became like those schemes that go door to door selling you boxes of knives or something crappy like that,” Musk says.

He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.

he unloaded about his father, but without mentioning the child Errol had just had with Jana. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk said, starting to cry. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”

In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally. And he did so after the July 2017 event marking the beginning of Model 3 production. He had one primary focus: ramping up production so that Tesla was churning out five thousand Model 3s per week.

“By trying to be nice to the people,” Musk says, “you’re actually not being nice to the dozens of other people who are doing their jobs well and will get hurt if I don’t fix the problem spots.”

Tesla stock was hovering near its all-time high in early 2018, making it more valuable than General Motors, even though GM had sold 10 million cars for a $12 billion profit the previous year, while Tesla had sold 100,000 cars and lost $2.2 billion. Those numbers, and skepticism about Musk’s five-thousand-cars-per-week pledge, made Tesla stock a magnet for short-sellers, who make money if the stock price falls. By 2018, Tesla had become the most shorted stock in history.

Musk made the opposite bet. The Tesla board granted him the boldest pay package in American history,

The payout would top out, Sorkin wrote, only “if Mr. Musk were somehow to increase the value of Tesla to $650 billion—a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible.”

“Get one of those permits and start building a huge tent,” he told Guillen. “We’ll have to pay a fine later.”

just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makeshift tent.

“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.”

At 1:53 a.m. on Sunday, July 1, a black Model 3 was disgorged from the factory with a paper banner across its windshield reading “5000th.” When Musk received a photograph of it on his iPhone, he sent a message to all Tesla workers: “We did it!!…

“I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk says. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.” It had five commandments: 1. Question every requirement.

If Musk had been the type of person who could pause and savor success, he would have noticed that he had just brought the world into the era of electric vehicles, commercial space flight, and reusable rockets. Each was a big deal.

In order to avoid a federal lawsuit for misleading investors, Musk’s lawyers worked on a deal with the SEC to settle the charges. He would remain CEO of Tesla, step down as chairman, pay a $40 million fine, and put two independent directors on his board. Another proviso destined to become an irritant: Musk would not be allowed to make public comments or tweets about any material information without getting clearance from a company monitor.

Musk surprised them by abruptly rejecting the proposed deal.

Reluctantly, he agreed to take the pragmatic course and accepted the SEC deal. The stock went back up.

As Gelles later noted, “In all the conversations I’ve had with business leaders over the years, not until Elon Musk got on the phone had an executive revealed such vulnerability.”

Musk took a tentative puff, mischievously. A few moments later, when they were talking about the role of geniuses in furthering civilization, Musk turned to look at his phone. “You getting text messages from chicks?” asked Rogan. Musk shook his head. “I’m getting text messages from friends saying, ‘What the hell are you doing smoking weed?’ ”

“I had my finance guy look at it, and the restaurants are struggling. I think they should die.” “What did you just say?” Kimbal yelled. “Fuck you. Fuck you! This is not how it works.” He reminded Elon, forcefully, that when Tesla’s finances were struggling, he had come to work by his brother’s side and provided him financing. “If you would’ve looked at Tesla finance, it should have died as well,” Kimbal said. “So this is not how this works.”

As part of President Xi Jinping’s plans to make China a clean-energy innovation center, China finally agreed in early 2018 to let Tesla build a factory without having to enter into a joint venture.