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

by Ashlee Vance

Seeing something so large hold so straight and steady while suspended in midair is hard for the brain to register.

Where these competitors rely on Russian and other foreign suppliers, SpaceX makes all of its machines from scratch in the United States.

He wants to lower the cost of launches to the point that it becomes economical and practical to fly thousands upon thousands of supply trips to Mars and start a colony. Musk wants to conquer the solar system, and, as it stands, there’s just one company where you can work if that sort of quest gets you out of bed in the morning.

Nothing sucks the fun out of working on a spaceship like controlling it with mechanisms last seen in a 1960s laundromat.

a giant samurai sword named Lady Vivamus, which Musk received when he won the Heinlein Prize, an award given for big achievements in commercial space.

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.

One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together.

Shotwell’s mom forced her to attend a lecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology on a Saturday afternoon. As Shotwell listened to one of the panels, she grew enamored with a fifty-year-old mechanical engineer. “She had these beautiful clothes, this suit and shoes that I loved,” Shotwell said. “She was tall and carried off the heels really well.” Shotwell chatted with the engineer after the talk, learning about her job. “That was the day I decided to become a mechanical engineer,” she said.

There were rules for everything, including lots of union regulations around who could operate certain machines. “I picked up a tool once, and got written up,” she said. “Then I opened a bottle of liquid nitrogen and got written up. I started thinking that the job was not what I had anticipated it would be.”

high-strength alloy Inconel—so

SpaceX is also busy building a spaceport from the ground up. The goal is to be able to launch many rockets an hour from this facility located in Brownsville, Texas, by automating the processes needed to stand a rocket up on the pad, fuel it, and send it off.

This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products.

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capricious.

“Elon’s worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection,”

Some of this staff, operating under this mix of pressure and surprise, only lasted between a few weeks and a few months. A few others have hung on for a couple of years before burning out or being fired.

The granddaddy example of Musk’s seemingly callous interoffice style occurred in early 2014 when he fired Mary Beth Brown. To describe her as a loyal executive assistant would be grossly inadequate. Brown often felt like an extension of Musk—the one being who crossed over into all of his worlds. For more than a decade, she gave up her life for Musk, traipsing back and forth between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley every week, while working late into the night and on weekends. Brown went to Musk and asked that she be compensated on par with SpaceX’s top executives, since she was handling so much of Musk’s scheduling across two companies, doing public relations work and often making business decisions. Musk replied that Brown should take a couple of weeks off, and he would take on her duties and gauge how hard they were. When Brown returned, Musk let her know that he didn’t need her anymore, and he asked Shotwell’s assistant to begin scheduling his meetings.

(Brown declined to be interviewed for this book, despite several requests.)

After adding up this behavior, dozens of people expressed to me their conclusion that Musk sits somewhere on the autism spectrum and that he has trouble considering other people’s emotions and caring about their well-being.

When Musk announced in 2014 that Tesla would open-source all of its patents, analysts tried to decide whether this was a publicity stunt or if it hid an ulterior motive or a catch. But the decision was a straightforward one for Musk. He wants people to make and buy electric cars. Man’s future, as he sees it, depends on this. If open-sourcing Tesla’s patents means other companies can build electric cars more easily, then that is good for mankind, and the ideas should be free. The cynic will scoff at this, and understandably so. Musk, however, has been programmed to behave this way and tends to be sincere when explaining his thinking—almost to a fault.

As Page puts it, “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”

I mean we just have a single proof point now that you can be really passionate about something that other people think is crazy and you can really succeed.

I think that means it should be repeatable in some sense. At least it’s repeatable by him. Maybe we should get him to do more things.”

“I don’t think we’re doing a good job as a society deciding what things are really important to do,” Page said.

What do I do? Create artificial adversity? How do you do that? The biggest battle I have is restricting their video game time because they want to play all the time. The rule is they have to read more than they play video games.

Musk wants, in effect, to build a space-based Internet in which the satellites would be close enough to the planet to beam down bandwidth at high speeds. Such a system would be useful for a couple of reasons: In areas too poor or too remote to have fiber-optic connections, it would provide people with high-speed Internet for the first time. It could also function as an efficient backhaul network for businesses and consumers.

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.