Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance

One thing that Musk holds in the highest regard is resolve, and he respects people who continue on after being told no.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.”

The conventional wisdom of the time said to take a deep breath and wait for the next big thing to arrive in due course. Musk rejected that logic by throwing $100 million into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into SolarCity. Short of building an actual money-crushing machine, Musk could not have picked a faster way to destroy his fortune. He became a one-man, ultra-risk-taking venture capital shop and doubled down on making super-complex physical goods in two of the most expensive places in the world, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Whenever possible, Musk’s companies would make things from scratch and try to rethink much that the aerospace, automotive, and solar industries had accepted as convention.

With Tesla Motors, Musk has tried to revamp the way cars are manufactured and sold, while building out a worldwide fuel distribution network at the same time. Instead of hybrids, which in Musk lingo are suboptimal compromises, Tesla strives to make all-electric cars that people lust after and that push the limits of technology.

Tesla does not sell these cars through dealers; it sells them on the Web and in Apple-like galleries located in high-end shopping centers.

What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.

The integration mentioned by Jung—the harmonious melding of software, electronics, advanced materials, and computing horsepower—appears to be Musk’s gift.

“When Elon gets into something, he develops just this different level of interest in it than other people. That is what differentiates Elon from the rest of humanity.”

What Musk would not tolerate were excuses or the lack of a clear plan of attack.

The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.

“Cellphones, refrigerators, color TV’s, they didn’t start off by making a low-end product for masses,” Eberhard told the paper.7 “They were relatively expensive, for people who could afford it.”

Throughout these early years, the engineers credited Eberhard with making quick, crisp decisions. Rarely did Tesla get hung up overanalyzing a situation. The company would pick a plan of attack, and when it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach.

“Then came this profound moment where we were reminded that building the car was not about getting to an IPO or selling it to a bunch of rich dudes but because it might change what a car is.”

It’s the spaceship equivalent of an Apple laptop or a Braun kettle—an elegant, purposeful machine stripped of frivolity and waste.

SpaceX is the hip, forward-thinking place that’s brought the perks of Silicon Valley—namely frozen yogurt, stock options, speedy decision making, and a flat corporate structure—to a staid industry.

The object is to find individuals who ooze passion, can work well as part of a team, and have real-world experience bending metal.

You can be sure, though, that he will roll out the Riddle: “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?” One answer to that is the North Pole, and most of the engineers get it right away. That’s when Musk will follow with “Where else could you be?” The other answer is somewhere close to the South Pole where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile. Fewer engineers get this answer, and Musk will happily walk them through that riddle and others and cite any relevant equations during his explanations. He tends to care less about whether or not the person gets the answer than about how they describe the problem and their approach to solving it.

People who have spent significant time with Musk will attest to his abilities to absorb incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall. It’s one of his most impressive and intimidating skills and seems to work just as well in the present day as it did when he was a child vacuuming books into his brain. After a couple of years running SpaceX, Musk had turned into an aerospace expert on a level that few technology CEOs ever approach in their respective fields. “He was teaching us about the value of time, and we were teaching him about rocketry,” Brogan said.

Asked about his approach, Musk said, I certainly don’t try to set impossible goals. I think impossible goals are demotivating. You don’t want to tell people to go through a wall by banging their head against it. I don’t ever set intentionally impossible goals. But I’ve certainly always been optimistic on time frames. I’m trying to recalibrate to be a little more realistic. I don’t assume that it’s just like 100 of me or something like that. I mean, in the case of the early SpaceX days, it would have been just the lack of understanding of what it takes to develop a rocket. In that case I was off by, say, 200 percent. I think future programs might be off by anywhere from like 25 percent to 50 percent as opposed to 200 percent. So, I think generally you do want to have a timeline where, based on everything you know about, the schedule should be X, and you execute towards that, but with the understanding that there will be all sorts of things that you don’t know about that you will encounter that will push the date beyond that. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have tried to aim for that date from the beginning because aiming for something else would have been an arbitrary time increase. It’s different to say, “Well, what do you promise people?” Because you want to try to promise people something that includes schedule margin. But in order to achieve the external promised schedule, you’ve got to have an internal schedule that’s more aggressive than that. Sometimes you still m...

Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.”

Davis, like Brogan and plenty of other SpaceX engineers, has had Musk ask for the seemingly impossible. His favorite request dates back to 2004. SpaceX needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal action used to steer the upper stage of Falcon 1. Davis had never built a piece of hardware before in his life and naturally went out to find some suppliers who could make an electromechanical actuator for him. He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, ‘That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device. The e-mail went into gory detail about how Davis had designed the part, why he had made various choices, and what its cost would be. As he pressed send, Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt. Musk rewarded all of this toil and angst with one of his standard responses. He wrote back, “Ok.” The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space. “I put every ounce of intellectual capital I had into that e-mail and one minute later got that simple response,” Davis said. “Everyone in the company was having that same experience.

One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very quickly. That is still how it works today.”

Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. I don’t want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.

The guiding principle at SpaceX is to embrace your work and get stuff done. People who await guidance or detailed instructions languish. The same goes for workers who crave feedback. And the absolute worst thing that someone can do is inform Musk that what he’s asking is impossible. An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”

June 7, 2013 Going Public Per my recent comments, I am increasingly concerned about SpaceX going public before the Mars transport system is in place. Creating the technology needed to establish life on Mars is and always has been the fundamental goal of SpaceX. If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not do so until Mars is secure. This is something that I am open to reconsidering, but, given my experiences with Tesla and SolarCity, I am hesitant to foist being public on SpaceX, especially given the long term nature of our mission. Some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience may think that being public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products. For those who are under the impression that they are so clever that they can outsmart public market investors and would sell SpaceX stock at the “right time,” let me relieve you of any such notion. If you really are better than most hedge fund managers, then there is no need to worry about the value of your SpaceX stock, as you can just invest in other public company stocks and make billions of dollars in the market. Elon

Tesla would make up for its lack of R&D money by hiring smart people who could outwork and outthink the third parties relied on by the rest of the automakers. “The mantra was that one great engineer will replace three medium ones,”

PC makers that farmed their software out to Microsoft, their chips to Intel, and their design to Asia could never make machines as beautiful and as complete as Apple’s.

“It’s not really like there was a rush to this idea, and we got there first,” Straubel said. “It is frequently forgotten in hindsight that people thought this was the shittiest business opportunity on the planet. The venture capitalists were all running for the hills.” What separated Tesla from the competition was the willingness to charge after its vision without compromise, a complete commitment to execute to Musk’s standards.

The Rives decided to make buying into the solar proposition much simpler and formed a company called SolarCity in 2006. Unlike other companies, they would not manufacture their own solar panels. Instead they would buy them and then do just about everything else in-house. They built software for analyzing a customer’s current energy bill and the position of their house and the amount of sunlight it typically received to determine if solar made sense for the property. They built up their own teams to install the solar panels. And they created a financing system in which the customer did not need to pay anything up front for the panels. The consumer leased the panels over a number of years at a fixed monthly rate. Consumers got a lower bill overall, they were no longer subject to the constantly rising rates of typical utilities, and, if they sold their house, they could pass the contract to the new owner. At the end of the lease, the homeowner could also upgrade to new, more efficient panels. Musk had helped his cousins come up with this structure and become the company’s chairman and its largest shareholder, owning about a third of SolarCity.

What’s more, SolarCity is a key part of what can be thought of as the unified field theory of Musk. Each one of his businesses is interconnected in the short term and the long term. Tesla makes battery packs that SolarCity can then sell to end customers. SolarCity supplies Tesla’s charging stations with solar panels, helping Tesla to provide free recharging to its drivers. Newly minted Model S owners regularly opt to begin living the Musk Lifestyle and outfit their homes with solar panels. Tesla and SpaceX help each other as well. They exchange knowledge around materials, manufacturing techniques, and the intricacies of operating factories that build so much stuff from the ground up.

“Elon has that deep appreciation for technology, the no-holds-barred attitude of a visionary, and that determination to go after long-term things that they both had,”

I’m more convinced than ever that Musk is, and has always been, a man on a quest, and that his brand of quest is far more fantastic and consuming than anything most of us will ever experience.

I’m also more convinced than ever that Musk is a deeply emotional person who suffers and rejoices in an epic fashion. This side of him is likely obscured by the fact that he feels most deeply about his own humanity-altering quest and so has trouble recognizing the strong emotions of those around him. This tends to make Musk come off as aloof and hard. I would argue, however, that his brand of empathy is unique. He seems to feel for the human species as a whole without always wanting to consider the wants and needs of individuals.